


But a Step Between

by togina



Series: Grace in Thine Eyes [1]
Category: Justified
Genre: 1980s, Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Child Abuse, Derogatory Language, Domestic Violence, M/M, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-18
Updated: 2017-03-11
Packaged: 2018-09-09 07:36:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 102,073
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8881639
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/togina
Summary: All Harlan knew about Arlo Givens's temper, feared Bo Crowder's revenge. All Harlan knew their sons hadn't lived up to their daddies' alpha dreams, never mind that Raylan had gotten the temper and Boyd had gotten the knot. (Harlan knew all about those boys - of course, the knowing didn't make it true.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is Part I of a three-part story (or, two parts and a bridge, the bridge being glimpses into Raylan's canonical twenty-year absence from Harlan), so **this part doesn't have the happy ending**.
> 
> It's canon divergent, in that it's ABO set in an ABO universe, and there is derogatory and misogynistic language tied to that (and aside from it), the sort you might expect from boys raised by Crowders and Givenses in Harlan, Kentucky. I use most of the ABO tropes without explanation, but please tell me if something's confusing or you're just interested in my personal thoughts on it. (I'm so excited about this epic saga, and would be more than willing to chatter on about it should you ask.) It probably doesn't really merit the Explicit rating, but there is sex?
> 
> Raylan and Boyd do have sex as underage teenagers, with other underage teenagers, in much the way high school students often do. So there is Raylan/OFC and Boyd/OFC, but since none of the OFCs are important I didn't bother to tag for it.
> 
> Title is from 1 Samuel 20:3 (KJV). "And David sware moreover, and said, Thy father certainly knoweth that I have found grace in thine eyes; and he saith, Let not Jonathan know this, lest he be grieved: but truly as the Lord liveth, and as thy soul liveth, there is but a step between me and death."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gorgeous cover art by laisserais, who deserves all the kudos and applause!

All the Givens men were alphas, Arlo claimed, waving his dick around at the urinals as though one stubby alpha dick could confirm the prowess of his entire line. Raylan was lucky he’d been born a boy, his daddy laughed, wrapping a hand around Raylan’s skinny arm and squeezing too hard. If his mama had pushed a little bitch out of her worthless cunt, Arlo would’ve drowned the baby in the creek, same as he’d do with any whining, unwanted pup.

Arlo had presented at twelve — early, for a Harlan boy. Most kids in the holler didn’t pop their knots until thirteen, and the hill clans even later than that, something the big-city doctors blamed on blue milk and hard water, on everything that offended their sensitive noses and sent them running back to Louisville with their reports. Arlo blamed the delay on inbreeding, said the hill clans were the worst of the lot.

Twelve was the year they carved Raylan’s name in marble, put his tombstone in the front yard like a guard dog posted to be sure that Raylan wouldn’t escape with his life.

Twelve was also the year that Clary Crowder died — her gravestone bigger, and in the churchyard like she’d asked, but carved by the same hand that etched Raylan’s name. (Arlo had done the man a favor. It was how he’d gotten all three Givens stones so cheap.) Raylan’s daddy and Bo Crowder were getting along that year, and Raylan’s mama had been close with Clary besides, so there was no question that the Givens family would be at the funeral.

Frances wrestled Raylan into his jacket, already tight in the shoulders and too short in the sleeves, brushed the lint off with a damp rag while Raylan stuck his head under the faucet so she could comb his hair.

It was summer and blistering hot under the sun, hotter inside the church with half of Harlan County packed in like sardines, sweat running in a slow, ticklish trickle down Raylan’s back and curling the damp ends of his hair.

The Crowders sat in the front row. Bo was easy to spot, his bulk crammed into an ill-fitting black suit, mopping sweat off his red face. Bowman sat to his left, ten years old and the biggest kid in fourth grade, even counting Jerry Dabney who’d been there three years. Boyd sat to his daddy’s right, only the furrows of his slicked-down hair visible over his daddy’s arm and the back of the pew. Raylan shifted, angling to get a better look, but he couldn’t catch a glimpse of Boyd’s face until they all shuffled past the open coffin to pay their respects to the dead.

Boyd’s eyes were red, like he’d caught hay fever, and his hands were clenched into fists. Raylan wanted to say something, wanted to duck out of the procession and drop down on the hard pew next to Boyd, but a Givens boy could hardly claim space on a pew with the Crowder family, not with the whole town watching. Besides, it wasn’t like he and Boyd were friends.

Raylan waited until they’d lowered Mrs. Crowder into the ground. Mr. Crowder set a whole bouquet of roses in after the casket, and Boyd threw the first handful of dirt into the open grave. Raylan shucked his jacket and stripped out of the starched white shirt underneath, leaving him in a white undershirt and itchy polyester slacks that fell, too-long, over polished, pinch-toed shoes.

He edged up behind the crowd, ignoring his mother’s disapproving hiss, shuffled at the edges of Boyd’s vision until his fidgeting caught the other boy’s eye. Boyd turned his head, stared straight at Raylan without blinking for a long, silent pause. Then he looked away without even a nod, as though all Raylan’s wiggling hadn’t caught his eye.

Raylan hunched his shoulders and slipped away into the crowd. His daddy had taught him to disappear, to crouch small and invisible under a grown man’s fists.

Arlo Givens stayed behind to talk business, and Frances fell in with the women clustered around Mrs. Crowder’s kin, so Raylan found an old, lichen-covered gravestone to lean against and drew shapes in the clouds, imagined the contrails belonged to a plane that would touch down on Harlan’s main street and take him away.

He lay there dreaming, until a shadow fell across his face and blocked out the sky.

Raylan scrambled to his feet, stomach tight and ready for the blow. Then the shadow sniffled and resolved itself into Boyd Crowder, still decked out in the buttoned shirt and baggy slacks of his mourning suit.

“Your daddy gone?” Boyd asked, red-rimmed eyes flashing down to where Raylan still had one hand curled protectively over his ribs. Raylan shoved the hand into his pocket and nodded. “Mine too,” Boyd murmured, low like he had a sore throat. “Everybody went back to the house for the wake. Aunt Betty keeps trying to hold Bowman’s hand.”

Raylan snorted. Grown-ups thought Bowman was still a roly-poly pup to be licked and cuddled, and Bowman thought he was already a man, snapping his teeth like he’d popped a knot years before he could.

“He bite her yet?” Raylan wondered, because biting had been Bowman’s favorite way to win fights since he was two. Boyd huffed — Raylan caught a flash of white teeth that could have been a smile, felt something warm in his chest at the sight — and shrugged.

“Probably. I doubt my brother could resist the temptation, once her fingers came near enough to be chewed.”

“Guess my family’s gone with ‘em, then,” Raylan said, craning his neck to catch a glimpse of the church parking lot. There was no sign of his daddy’s truck, and Raylan knew that meant he’d be walking home in his thin-soled, pinch-toed shoes. His shoulders slumped, thinking of the hills between there and home. “Why ain’t you gone, too?” he asked, glancing back around to Boyd Crowder, who stood there with sweat sticking his shirt to his armpits and grave dirt scuffing his hems.

Boyd shrugged. “I seen my house filled before,” he pointed out, staring at the ground. Granny Crowder had died two years back, Raylan remembered. He hadn’t gone to that funeral, since Arlo was behind on his payments and didn’t want to be shot. “It’s just lots of old women pinching my cheek and calling me a little man, and Daddy’s friends congratulating me on my knot.”

Since neither of them seemed to be going anywhere, Raylan sat back down next to the old gravestone, laid back and crossed his arms under his head.

“You popped your knot?” he finally said, trying to keep his voice steady. “Your daddy must be thrilled.”

There was a huffing noise above him, and then Boyd dropped down next to him on the grass, unbuttoning his fancy shirt. “My daddy ain’t been thrilled about much this year,” he retorted, sharp as lye and stinging the eyes. Then he looked at Raylan and smirked. “You jealous, Raylan? You wanting to make your daddy proud?”

Raylan shifted to flip him off, and Boyd laughed the way he had at school when Principal Webb had threatened Raylan with detention for fighting, and Raylan had asked if he’d be serving that detention in a classroom, or on his knees under the principal’s desk alongside Mary Belle. Boyd had laughed harder when Webb’s face turned tomato red, clapped when Webb had surrendered and told Raylan to get on the fucking bus and go home.

“Mostly, I want him not to drown me in the creek,” Raylan replied honestly, after a few minutes of squinting at the sun behind the clouds.

“Your daddy ain’t gonna drown you,” Boyd scoffed. “You’re too big. ‘Sides, Raylan, it’s practically the twenty-first century. Ain’t the end of the world to go without a knot.”

“Oh yeah?” Raylan turned his head and found Boyd staring back, rolled his eyes so Boyd could see. There were pieces of grass stuck in Boyd’s hair. The church must have mowed the lawn that morning to have everything nice for the burial of Bo Crowder’s mate. “You telling me your daddy wouldn’t mind a beta for a son? An _omega_?”

Boyd winced. He couldn’t meet Raylan’s eyes — Boyd needed to get a lot better at lying, Raylan considered, if he wanted to keep making his daddy proud. “Well, he wouldn’t drown me in the creek,” Boyd decided, even if he didn’t look too sure. “And what the hell do you mean, omega? Boys ain’t omegas.”

“They are on TV,” Raylan drawled, raising both eyebrows to indicate what he thought of that. Lots of strange things — impossible things — were on TV, things like weddings and skyscrapers and alphas kissing other alphas. “Maybe they exist, and they’ve all moved to the cities, or they’re on sups like omega girls. Before that ... well, I imagine their daddies drowned them in the creek.”

“You have a vivid imagination,” Boyd said, but his lips were tight, pinched close like Raylan’s toes in his Sunday shoes. Finally, he turned his gaze back to the sky, reached out with his foot and kicked lightly at Raylan’s shin. “All right, Raylan Givens,” he said, and Raylan was close enough to catch the curl of Boyd’s lips. “If you turn out to be the first boy bitch ever in the history of Harlan, I promise not to let your daddy drown you in any creek, quarry, or pond.”

“Why thank you kindly.” Raylan fluttered his eyelashes, put a hand to his forehead and feigned a swoon. “What would I ever do without you, Boyd Crowder?”

“I guess you’d have to go on the run,” Boyd answered, but Raylan could see the smile slip off his face.

The breeze had kicked up, sent some flowers rolling their way, whites and lavenders and blues sailing across the cemetery from where they’d been piled at Clary Crowder’s feet. Boyd had skipped out on the wake to hide from his mama’s ghost, and here Raylan was letting them linger at her grave.

“C’mon.” He rolled to his feet and reached down to grab Boyd’s wrist and haul him up without waiting for the other boy to agree. He wondered briefly why Boyd hadn’t gone to see Johnny or one of the other boys he hung out with at school, then realized they all must be at the wake. Raylan had offered his help, sneaking close during the burial, and Boyd had accepted. Now it was up to Raylan to figure out what to do. “Let’s go get ice cream. Milkshakes, maybe. Then go steal some pears from the Hollands’ yard.”

Boyd dusted himself off and gathered up his starched shirt, then frowned at Raylan. “Why?” he asked, sounding serious like Boyd never did, and Raylan wasn’t sure if the other boy was asking why ice cream and pears, or why Raylan wasn’t walking away to leave Boyd alone in a cemetery with his mama’s corpse.

Raylan slung an arm around Boyd’s pointy shoulders and pulled him close, both of them smelling like sweat and cut grass. “The way I figure it,” he said conspiratorially, keeping his voice to a hum and his head dipped low. “Today, Boyd Crowder, you could get free ice cream at every shop in this town, with sprinkles and fudge, and I’m betting Old Man Holland won’t fill our backsides full of buckshot, neither, not today. I am just ...” He trailed off, too smart to finish that sentence with “trying to keep you from thinking ‘bout your mama dead in the ground.”

“Profiting off my loss?” Boyd suggested drily, but he was smiling, his reddened eyes bright. “That’s quite the scam, Raylan. Could we get free moon pies from the gas station, do you think?”

“Free moon pies,” Raylan echoed, staring at Boyd with wide eyes. Free _moon pies_. “Only one way to find out,” he said, his grin a mirror to Boyd’s, and both boys lit out of the cemetery at a run.

* * *

On Raylan’s fourteenth birthday, when he still hadn’t popped a knot, Arlo offered Raylan the whiskey bottle base first, caught him in the face and knocked him to the floor. It was early, and so the whiskey bottle was full enough to make Raylan’s ears ring and send blood dripping from his nose.

“It’s your fault that boy’s balls haven’t dropped,” Arlo declared, turning to Frances and swinging the bottle into his omega’s ribs. “Fucking inbred hill folk.” He shoved his mate into the counter, jarred it so that the bowl filled with the ingredients she’d been mixing for Raylan’s cake crashed to the floor, ceramic shards and viscous chocolate batter scattered around Raylan’s ringing head. “Boy’s probably defective. Should’ve pinched his nose shut when I had the chance.”

Raylan went to school with spatters of birthday cake across his sleeve, a swollen cheek from the bottle and a cut on his temple from the bowl.

Nobody said anything.

Of course, it wasn’t exactly out of the ordinary, and Raylan didn’t exactly have _friends_ , not the kind who’d worry about his face. He was the best batter on their League team, so Coach Vaughn’s son Billy sat with him at lunch and tried to copy off his tests. Billy was closer than anyone else. Nobody knew it was his birthday, or they might have guessed why Arlo had lost his temper so early in the day.

On the other hand, maybe they would’ve been surprised. Everyone in eighth grade had already assumed that Raylan was a beta. They must have, given the way the other boys snickered when he came into the locker room, Jimmy and Delray and Monroe laughing along with them, like maybe everyone would forget that they were betas, too.

Raylan had held out some hope — wouldn’t admit to swallowing a few tadpoles, rubbing unsavory things on his dick because maybe the folk remedies were true — until a few weeks ago, when he realized their entire grade had already presented, and Raylan wasn’t sporting a knot. Wasn’t going to. Arlo was the only one left in Harlan who was still waiting for an alpha son.

“Happy birthday, Raylan,” someone breathed into his ear, throwing themselves against his back and getting an elbow to the ribs for their trouble. Raylan’s assailant bent forward with a huff, and Raylan grinned.

“Why thank you, Boyd,” he said cheerfully, not bothering to glance backwards to watch Boyd Crowder catch his breath. He’d known who it was. There was only one person in the whole school who’d bother to know Raylan’s birthday, even if Raylan couldn’t for the life of him figure out _why_. “Did you buy me something nice?”

Boyd caught up a few steps later, slinging an arm around Raylan’s neck and pulling him off-balance, since Raylan had an inch or two on Boyd. “Bought you the prettiest little diamond earrings I could find,” Boyd answered, cackling so loudly that the hall monitor turned to glare. “Bought ‘em special to go with that red dress you always say is too nice for the holler.”

Several people stopped to stare, at that, probably stupid enough to think that Raylan actually owned a red dress, and that the oldest Crowder boy was taking “that Givens beta” out on the town. Raylan raised his eyes to the heavens and sighed. Five more years and he’d never have to set foot in Harlan County again.

“Well, you know that dress barely covers my tits,” he replied in a falsetto that made Boyd snort. “My mama always says dresses like that need some _jewelry_ , to keep a gentleman’s eyes up where they belong. Best be a diamond necklace, to match the earrings you already bought.”

Boyd grinned, the same response he’d always had to Raylan’s sarcasm, whether or not it was directed at him. “Of course,” he agreed, his brown eyes dancing. “Nothing but the best for you, Raylan Givens. Nothing but the best.”

“You knothead.” Raylan grabbed the wrist dangling over his shoulder and used it to twist out from under Boyd’s arm. “Now the whole school is gonna think that Bo Crowder’s alpha son is sniffing after a beta, and a freakishly tall, _male_ beta at that.”

Boyd scowled, then, glared at Raylan like Raylan was an omega who’d be cowed by an alpha’s wrath. Raylan rolled his eyes. He didn’t know what Boyd’s problem was, but Crowder got that mulish, angry look every time Raylan brought up their designations. Hell, Raylan still didn’t know why Boyd kept finding him in the hallways between classes, but he’d been doing it for almost two years now and refused to go away.

“You don’t even know that you _are_ a beta, Raylan Givens,” Boyd snapped, folding his arms. “Could be that –”

“I’m a sexless alien sent to Harlan County for my crimes against the galaxy?” Raylan finished, and Boyd tried to hold his glower but couldn’t help the way his lips twitched, thinking of Raylan Givens wrapped in tinfoil talking to outer space. Boyd had been on a science fiction kick for months, reading Douglas Adams and spouting strange theories in Raylan’s ears. “I’m fourteen, Boyd. Ain’t nobody but hill folks ever popped a knot later than fourteen. Even Daddy knows that.” He gestured at his swollen face, the bruising on his cheek. “Can’t you tell?”

“Hmph.” Boyd took a deep breath, no doubt gearing up to argue about Raylan’s status or his intergalactic crimes, but one long glance at Raylan’s puffy cheek drew him up short. Raylan was grateful. He didn’t want the hope that Boyd kept trying to sell. It would just make it harder, when days kept passing and Raylan stayed the same. Harlan had no love for its beta boys, but then, Raylan wasn’t planning to stick around. There were plenty of betas in the major leagues, and baseball was Raylan’s ticket out of the holler and into the world.

“Your daddy gonna be there when you get home?” Boyd asked, breaking into Raylan’s daydream about a hit that would shatter the bat, stadium lights and tailored uniforms and millions of folks cheering on his home run.

Raylan shrugged, twisted his mouth to show he didn’t know, and cared even less. “Might be, if my mama’s cooking dinner. Course, the way it went this morning, she might’ve taken off for Nobles after breakfast, in which case he’ll be at the VFW drinking his grains.”

Boyd bit the inside of his lip. He knew why white women ran off to Nobles Holler, and Arlo Givens spent enough time at the Crowder house for Boyd to know how he’d be when Raylan got home.

“Come fishing with me,” Boyd said, burst out with it like he was nerdy Alvra Scroggins trying to ask a girl on a date. Raylan raised his eyebrows.

“Excuse me?”

“Come fishing with me,” Boyd said again, a little calmer, and scuffed his shoe on the linoleum floor. “After school. I’ve got a couple poles stashed in a tree by the old mill pond, and we can stop for milkshakes on the way.” Raylan opened his mouth to decline, because it was one thing to listen to Boyd chatter by their lockers and another to risk his daddy’s wrath and the bullying of the other Crowder boys, but Boyd started up again before he got the chance. “If your daddy asks, tell him we was running an errand for my daddy. Doing Bo a favor, to keep your family in good with mine.”

That was an excuse Arlo would believe, drunk or sober as he ever got. Raylan cocked his head, peering at Boyd’s fidgeting hands and wondering again why Boyd was still trying to pay back a debt from one afternoon two years gone. It hadn’t been a hardship, to drag Boyd out of the graveyard, to share free sundaes and split the haul from the gas station’s candy shelf. But if Boyd was offering, then –

“Do I need to put on my red dress, or just the earrings and a tie?”

Boyd shouted his laughter through the school, threw his arm back around Raylan’s neck and tried to choke him as he dragged him to science class, glancing over every few seconds and grinning like Raylan had agreed to strip naked and climb the flagpole outside school. Boyd sure was pleased to pay off his debts, Raylan thought, and shook his head.

* * *

Two days after his fourteenth birthday, Raylan woke up on fire, burning from the inside out. When he staggered in front of the bathroom mirror, his face was flushed a splotchy, livid red that made the white of his scars stand out like brands.

Everything hurt. His bones ached, his stomach was cramping, threatening to send his dinner back the way it came, and his skin felt like a million fire ants had bitten clear through. Hell, even his asshole felt rubbed raw, like that time they’d run out of toilet paper and used newsprint instead.

Frances found him laying naked in the bathroom, pressing every inch of skin he could to the blessedly cool ceramic of the empty tub.

“You’re late for school!” she’d hollered, stomping up the stairs. “Raylan Givens, you get down here right this second before you miss the – Boy, what are you doing?”

“Can’t go,” Raylan croaked, tensing through another stomach cramp and trying not to puke, tears running down his temples from the corners of his eyes. The tears were probably boiling, trails of lit gasoline across his overheated skin. “Sick.”

“I can see that,” his mama had said, leaning forward with her hand outstretched. Then she stopped, and sniffed.

Raylan couldn’t see that well through the tears and the fever lighting sparklers behind his eyes, but he thought her face might have gone white as Mrs. Crowder’s in the coffin almost two years before. “God dammit,” she hissed, and in fourteen years Raylan had never heard his mama take the Lord’s name in vain.

Next thing he knew she was pulling him to his feet, and by the time the vertigo wore off he was in his bedroom and his mama was dragging a shirt over his head and folding his uncooperative arms into the sleeves. “C’mon, Raylan,” she said, voice low and urgent. “C’mon, we got to go before your daddy comes home. Raylan, we got to _go_.” It sounded like something she’d been saying for a while, so Raylan obliged her by shoving his arms into the shirt, even though it felt like hairy spiders and cockroach legs against his skin.

Later, Raylan would be glad that Arlo had left that night on a run for Bo Crowder, acting as security for a shipment bound north out of Harlan. Not that he hadn’t been glad about it before, a few days without his daddy home. Maybe there’d be time to go fishing with Boyd again; they could smoke the cigarettes Raylan had lifted from his Aunt Helen’s purse. But he hadn’t known then how bad it would be, if his daddy had stayed.

The gravestone mocked him as they pulled out of the drive, _Raylan Givens, 1970 -   , Beloved Son. Lucky you weren’t born a bitch, boy, or I’d‘ve drowned you in the creek._

“C’mon c’mon c’mon.” Raylan’s mama muttered to herself the whole drive, leaning in close to the steering wheel like it would make the old car rattle faster down the road. Raylan slumped against the door and drifted away, thinking about baseball and stadium lights and not about how he wanted to tear off his own skin.

They drove north for hours, which Raylan only noticed when his mother tugged him out of the car and into the large parking lot for the ‘South Lexington Medical Center’ and not the graffitied Harlan clinic where Dr. Griggs sold drugs in the back.

“What are we doing here?” he rasped, squinting in a doomed attempt to focus the world spinning in dizzying loops around his head. His mama didn’t answer, but Raylan found out all the same when they checked in.

“Just turned fourteen,” his mama said, responding to the nurse with the clipboard. “Ain’t got no allergies, nothing but – nothing but _this_.” Raylan had heard his mama swallow her sobs too many times to count, reached out reflexively to pat her hand. She was awful upset, he thought, and she didn’t even know how poorly Raylan felt. “Please. We need suppressants. As many as you can prescribe.”

Suppressants?

Raylan struggled to wade through the rubbery Jell-O of his brain. Suppressants were for omegas. But Raylan’s mama didn’t use them — almost no omegas in Harlan did, either out hoping to snare a decent mate or already claimed and bred. Why was she so upset, and what did sups have to do with driving hours to Lexington when Raylan was experiencing the torments of hell? His mama clutched him to her chest, still sobbing, and Raylan didn’t want to think about it anymore, didn’t want to put the puzzle pieces together and see –

Omega.

_Boys ain’t omegas._

_I imagine that’s because their daddies drowned them in the creek._

_Raylan Givens, if there were as many people drowned in creeks as you say, we wouldn’t be able to skip a stone without hitting a corpse._

_It’s just the babies in the creek, Boyd. Ain’t your daddy taught you that all the grown-ups go into the slurry pond?_

Raylan wondered if someone could overdose on the suppressants his mama was begging them to prescribe. If not, he’d have to bargain with Boyd for some of Bo’s drug stash. Anything to deny Arlo the satisfaction of killing his omega son. Hell, maybe he could just go straight to Boyd’s daddy with his predicament. Bo Crowder would no doubt be happy to shoot the omega freak himself.

“Shh, you’re fine, baby, you’re fine,” his mama whispered, brushing back his hair. Raylan looked around and saw his mama’s house shoes — she hadn’t changed, too busy rushing her defective son out the door — and the loafers that must belong to the doctor, in front of the heels of a nurse. Somehow he’d ended up on the floor, shivering through his first heat. _Heat_. Jesus.

“Well now, son,” the doctor boomed, smiling around the disgust he certainly felt, faced with an omega boy. “Why don’t I help you on back to an exam room, and we can take a look?”

And there wasn’t anything Raylan could do, omega and _sick_ with it, unable to coordinate his limbs and run so that no one would ever see him again. Instead, he was stripped bare and laid out on a table while the doctor shoved a flashlight in his ears and a thermometer in his mouth and something cold and metal up his ass. Maybe they could cut it out of him, the omega part, the way farmers cut off a calf’s balls.

Two days ago Raylan had gone fishing with Boyd Crowder. They’d lazed at the edge of the millpond till the sun went down behind the trees, chewing on bubble gum Boyd had nicked from the convenience store and talking shit about the Wildcats’ defense and Principal Webb and the whole sorry Bennett clan. Two days ago Raylan had been sunburned with a swollen cheek and a jaw sore from grinning the whole walk home while Boyd flailed around acting out his Aunt Betty’s soap operas and pretending to admire the diamond earrings in Raylan’s ears.

Two days ago he’d been someone.

Now he was nobody, a dead omega walking with a gravestone that would read, _Raylan Givens, 1970-1984,_ the ‘beloved son’ scratched out and replaced with ‘worthless bitch,’ if Arlo had any say.

The doctor gave his mother the suppressants, two giant bottles that should last through the summer, “don’t need as many for a fourteen-year-old, ma’am, or for a male, I don’t think. This should do, though if you can scent him, have him take two and bring him back here for another exam.”

There were no male omegas, not in Harlan. Raylan watched the Kentucky hills fly by and couldn’t hold the laughter in, doubled over and giggling high-pitched and harsh, unable to quit laughing long enough to breathe. No male omegas. Wouldn’t Boyd be surprised.

* * *

There were only a few more weeks in the school year, and Raylan’s mother swore he didn’t smell like anything at all and refused to let him stay home and wait for his daddy to shoot him dead. Raylan assumed she was telling the truth, since Arlo came and left again, and didn’t force Raylan to dig his own hole in the ground before putting him down like the little bitch he’d turned out to be.

It was easy enough to avoid everyone for a few weeks, though confusingly it was harder to dodge Boyd Crowder than to lose the whole baseball team, even though they didn’t share a table at lunch or catch the same bus from school.

Raylan snuck into the library during free periods — which was a mistake, because apparently Boyd _enjoyed_ the library, and got them both kicked out with his dramatic reading of _King Lear_ — and skipped gym, afraid that somehow his body would give the secret away. Boyd started waiting at Raylan’s locker before school, and Raylan went to class without his books.

It would’ve been easy to avoid everyone all summer, if Arlo Givens could make an honest dime on his own. Raylan couldn’t have stayed inside — he’d grown three more inches, tall enough to push his daddy down the stairs and desperate for the opportunity to try — but he could have pitched a tent in the yard and stayed out back where no one could see him or smell him or otherwise find themselves in the presence of a freak.

But fourteen was old enough to earn a wage, and Arlo appreciated that, even if he didn’t appreciate that Raylan dared to exist, a Givens without a knot. So Raylan found himself behind the counter at the Gilliam ice cream shop, because Mr. Gilliam didn’t like working the counter, his daughter Evelee had mated last year, and his boys Hassell and Harvard were driving trucks for more money than ice cream could pay.

 “Why, if it ain’t Raylan Givens,” someone drawled, in tune with the bell jingling over the door. Raylan sighed. He was cleaning out the soft-serve machine, his back to the door, but he knew that voice. He’d spent two years with it jabbering in his ear.

Raylan should have asked to work at the Cut ’n’ Curl. The only people he knew who went there were omega women the same age as his mama.

“Working a real job, earning a man’s wage. You see that, Johnny? Here he is, attending to all our needs.”

 _You in need of a self-lubricating asshole?_ Raylan didn’t say, though he had to bite his tongue and grin sharply at Boyd until the urge to out himself passed. _Because I can oblige._

The whole Crowder gang was there: Boyd, Johnny, Bowman, their second cousin Merle and a few omega girls Raylan was fairly certain had been shanghaied by Bowman and the new knot he was waving all over town. Raylan loosened his shoulders, tightened his stomach like he always did when he could feel the swing coming, and cracked his neck.

“And what are your needs today, Boyd Crowder?” he asked, rubbing a damp rag across the counter he’d scrubbed clean not five minutes ago. “A milkshake? A double scoop? A sundae to share with your _girls_?” Boyd’s face dimmed, at that last one, as though after two years he couldn’t recognize one of Raylan’s jokes. Raylan rubbed the bridge of his nose and leaned his elbows on the counter, stretching out his back. “Can I take your order?” he tried again, polite.

“Chocolate milkshake,” Johnny grunted, in an attempt to sound like the kind of full-grown alpha that apparently ate rocks. Raylan stifled his grin, and caught Boyd doing the same. They shared a discreet smile before Raylan remembered the suppressants hidden in his closet and looked away. “With two straws,” Johnny added, towing one of the girls over by the belt loop on her tight shorts.

“A chocolate milkshake,” Raylan echoed, choking down his laughter. “Anything else?”

One of the girls ordered a strawberry milkshake, Bowman ordered three scoops of ice cream in a bowl with _one_ spoon, no doubt so his girl could only eat what he offered her, and Merle ordered a frozen chocolate banana on a stick. Raylan ducked under the counter for more napkins, at that, because he couldn’t quite swallow his laugh.

“And for you?” he asked Boyd, scooping Bowman’s ice cream and staring hard at the gallon of chocolate chip.

Boyd waited until Raylan lifted his head, and Raylan couldn’t help but stare at his friend. Boyd’s cheeks were flushed with the summer sun, shoulders peeling with a burn. The Crowder boys must have gone to the quarry that morning, or maybe Boyd had taken them fishing, now that Raylan couldn’t go.

“I thought I might have a sundae, Raylan,” Boyd said, so quiet that Raylan barely caught the words. “If you’re going on your break, perhaps you’d like to share it with me?”

Boyd Crowder was the most confusing human being Raylan had ever met. Sharing a sundae was something they did when they were _twelve_ , kid stuff, but they were fourteen now and all the other boys were sharing with their omega dates. Unless – unless Boyd was telling Raylan that he’d sniffed it out, playing with him before announcing it to the shop. Raylan’s pulse rabbited up, but when he tried to bend his head and scent himself he didn’t smell a damn thing besides strawberry sauce, so it couldn’t be that. Boyd couldn’t _know_.

 _Calm the fuck down_ , he warned himself, and dropped his hands from his apron tie where he’d been ready to strip it off and race for the door.

“I don’t have a break,” he told Boyd shortly, turning to hand Merle his banana on a stick. Then he thought about seventh and eighth grade, Boyd Crowder chasing him down the halls, going up on his tiptoes to reel Raylan in and inform him about the piglet they’d cut open in science class or the newest Le Guin book that he’d read. Raylan thought about the millpond, and turning fourteen.

“Besides,” he found himself saying while he scooped too much ice cream into a sundae bowl and waited for Boyd’s resigned expression to lift. “I won’t be sharing anything with you, Boyd Crowder, until I get that diamond necklace to go with my dress.”

And it was probably because he was an omega that Boyd’s resulting grin could seem so bright, could loosen all the muscles Raylan had tightened when the Crowders walked in. Any alpha’s grin would do the same. Even so, Raylan tucked a second spoon into Boyd’s sundae, and Boyd insisted that his gang sit at the counter where he could put his bowl in arm’s reach and pretend not to see Raylan sneak a spoonful every few bites.

* * *

In middle school, high school had seemed to be an eternity away, but the summer flew past and suddenly there they were, woefully unprepared for the first day of ninth grade. Only three high schools in the whole county, and Evarts was as big as it would have to be, every corner permeated with the thick scent of a thousand alphas and omegas, interspersed with scentless, unremarkable betas who might as well not exist. With so many people, nobody noticed Raylan, not until he was on the field and up to bat, the only freshman to make the varsity team.

Except, that wasn’t entirely true. _Girls_ noticed Raylan, didn’t seem to mind that he was a beta, any of them, alpha girls and beta girls and omega girls smelling like fruit a few days past ripe.

Raylan didn’t understand it. He had gotten tall, sure — unheard of, for a beta to be so tall, and Arlo claimed that was the Givens alpha sprouting up despite the bad crop — but he was still skinnier than a rail and a freak to boot. When he looked in the mirror at night he couldn’t see what drew girls in: brown hair he left too long so that it would cover the pimples on his forehead, razor burn under his chin where he shaved even though he had yet to sprout a single hair. Maybe he never would; Raylan didn’t know any more about male omegas than the Lexington doctors told him, on his rare trips.

Raylan got his own sups, now. Took his mama’s sedan north to the city every few months, until his mama’s little brother Silas gave him his old truck. It was the best gift Raylan expected he’d ever get. (Of course, Uncle Silas was running from the company men at the mine, and he needed a new ride. Raylan had been pulled over three times the first month he had the truck, beaten once despite looking nothing like his uncle or a grown man.)

Even with the cost of a beating, it was worth it to be the only fifteen-year-old with his own truck, especially in Harlan where no one cared about a license as long as he looked old enough and sober enough to drive.

That truck was where he took Charlene Risner to the drive-in, then took her up to the ridge and into the back, lost his virginity sliding into her pussy and panting with relief. Raylan hadn’t been certain till then that he could do that, that he could take a woman like a man and not like a bitch, and he was so pleased that he dated Charlene for two more weeks just to do it again.

He only dated beta girls, at first. Betas were safe: they had a notoriously poor sense of smell, and Raylan didn’t know if the sups masked his scent during sex, same as he didn’t know anything else about being a freak. He knew he could get hard, and he knew he could come, even if coming didn’t put much in the condom and left his asshole clenching on air.

Eventually, locker room talk about omegas made Raylan curious enough to risk it. He said yes when Corliss Young asked him to the Sadie Hawkins dance, because Corliss was the dumbest omega in the county, far as he could tell, and Boyd agreed. He drove her up to the point, after, and she didn’t seem to notice anything wrong, wasn’t even bothered that he couldn’t give her a knot. At least there was _someone_ in Harlan who didn’t care about Raylan’s absent knot.

He took out a few omegas, after that. Turned down all the alpha girls, though. There was courting trouble, and then there was asking for disaster, and Raylan wasn’t about to push his luck.

Boyd complained that between baseball and bitches Raylan was never around, pouted worse than the alpha girls did when Raylan told them no. Boyd didn’t mean anything by it, of course, was just teasing Raylan about his unprecedented success.

Boyd didn’t mean anything by it, which didn’t explain why Raylan demanded that Gracie bring her sister along, when she begged him for a date. Didn’t explain why he drove them all up to the ridge after the movie and offered Boyd and Laura the bed of his truck while Raylan and Gracie stayed in the cab.

The moon had been full, that night, so bright that Raylan could see Boyd’s shoulder blades flex under his tan skin, watch the muscles in his ass flex as he pounded into Gracie’s sister. Raylan, inside Gracie, matched him thrust for thrust.

Boyd brought his own girls, after that, and Raylan didn’t wonder why he’d stopped going on dates where Boyd and his girl weren’t crammed into the cab beside him, why Boyd never seemed to go looking for pussy when Raylan wasn’t there.

* * *

Raylan’s sixteenth birthday had left his father in the front yard, toasting his tombstone, _Raylan Givens, 1970-1986_. He drove through town to curve back into the holler to pick up Boyd, relieved as always that Bowman was still in middle school and took the bus.

Boyd was waiting, his backpack packed till the zippers strained and two shiny fishing poles over his arm.

“We studying marine biology, now?” Raylan inquired, raising an eyebrow at the bait box in Boyd’s hand.

Boyd shoved the fishing poles into Uncle Silas’s rifle rack, swung the bag in and clambered up into the truck, all elbows and knees and bright flashes of teeth.

“If that’s what you want, Raylan,” Boyd offered, smiling at Raylan the way he always did, like he knew things about Raylan that Raylan had yet to learn. “It is your birthday, after all. But I thought you might prefer to go fishing out at the Forks. I borrowed my daddy’s nice poles, and I packed some of Aunt Etta’s chili and her cigarettes, along with a jar of Mags’s ‘shine.”

“The apple pie?” Raylan breathed, impressed. It wasn’t every boy who could celebrate his sixteenth birthday with Mags Bennett’s fabled apple pie moonshine. He shifted the truck into drive, and didn’t hesitate to turn left instead of right at the road. Boyd grinned.

“And please tell me your Aunt Etta’s cooking is better than your Aunt Betty’s. That last batch of biscuits damn near cracked my teeth.”

Ever since Mrs. Crowder had died, the family had acquired a never-ending parade of aunts, come to help the poor omega-less Crowder family with cooking for and coddling two alpha boys. _Two_ alpha boys for the Crowders, and none at all for the last of the Givens clan. No wonder Arlo hated Bo Crowder, once he got into the drink.

“I made peanut butter sandwiches just in case,” Boyd appeased, and Raylan appreciated that, because Boyd didn’t look all that certain about the chili. “But she _is_ better at cooking that Aunt Betty, I swear.”

“ _I’m_ better at cooking than your Aunt Betty,” Raylan retorted, rolling the window down and tipping his head into the breeze, sixteen and light as a feather, skipping school and bouncing over dirt roads with Boyd Crowder in the passenger seat and moonshine in the jar.

He should’ve known better than to feed Boyd such an easy line. “Of course you are, darling,” Boyd declared, scooting across the bench seat and snuggling right up to Raylan’s side like a girl. “And you look so much prettier than she does, decked out in your diamonds and fancy high-heeled shoes.”

“If I’ve got the shoes and the diamonds, what happened to the dress?” Raylan sniped, fishtailing around a muddy turn.

“Why, I imagine I already tore it clear off,” Boyd whispered heatedly, sliding a hand up Raylan’s thigh, then hurling himself back against the far door before Raylan could sock him in the jaw, cackling so hard Raylan could see tears in his eyes.

Raylan said something back, sardonic and straight-faced the way Boyd liked him best, and didn’t think about the way he’d shivered when Boyd’s hand rode high on his thigh. Didn’t think about the way his asshole had tightened like a girl’s eager cunt, because he was on his sups and he was practically a beta and there was _nothing to think about_.

Instead, he mocked Boyd until his stomach hurt from laughing. Instead, they hiked out to the river and threw in their lines, threw Aunt Etta’s chili to the fishes and got drunk off Mags Bennett’s apple pie.

Raylan was sixteen and skipping school on a perfect autumn day, sixteen with the sun burning his skin and the breeze ruffling his hair, shoulder to shoulder with Boyd Crowder, drunk on moonshine and grinning at a boy.


	2. Chapter 2

It took Boyd years to realize what it was. At first — in elementary school, when Arlo and Bo weren’t associating and Boyd wasn’t to hang around the Givens boy, wasn’t meant to hang around anyone who wasn’t kin — he’d thought it was because Raylan was _smart_ , smarter than the rest of their class; smarter than the teachers, just like Boyd. Or maybe it was because Raylan came to school with bruises he didn’t bother to hide, fought with any boy who said a word about them and refused to stay down.

Boyd had been watching Raylan a long time.

They spoke, occasionally. Even Boyd’s daddy couldn’t begrudge him that, not when Raylan was his partner for a fourth-grade project on the presidents.

“Andrew Jackson,” Boyd had insisted, dragging his desk over to Raylan’s, because he’d been watching long enough to know that Raylan wasn’t the sort who moved when somebody told him to. All Harlan loved Andrew Jackson like he was their own son: the school library had five books on Jackson, not counting the one about his horse.

“Ulysses Grant,” Raylan had fired back, and at ten years old Boyd was rendered speechless for the first time, struck dumb by this boy’s grit. Raylan had surprised him. _Nobody_ surprised Boyd.

“My daddy will _kill_ me,” Boyd whispered, breathless at the possibility of it all.

“Mine too,” Raylan declared with a fierce, gap-toothed grin, and that was that. They wrote the longest essay in class, stood up and gave a rousing speech about Ulysses S. Grant. They got beaten for their troubles, in class and out; and limped home triumphant, carrying blood-red bruises and red-inked C’s.

 

Then there was his mama’s funeral. Boyd couldn’t recall any of it — not her sisters wailing through the house, not the drive to the church behind the hearse, not the service or the last glimpse of his mama’s face looking all wrong, not the handshakes of a hundred strangers he was meant to know. There was nothing, that day, not until Raylan slipped into view, out of place in his undershirt and his freckled, sunburnt arms, his wide eyes and sweaty fingers beckoning Boyd near.

Boyd liked to say that they’d knocked over the gas station that day, held Penny up behind the counter and took off with the loot. As it happened, Penny had given them everything they’d asked for, same as Evelee Gilliam at the ice cream shop and Pearl Reece letting them sneak into _Raiders of the Lost Ark_ for free.

Boyd’s mother was dead, but every time he remembered that — every time he felt his twelve-year-old chest crack open like a watermelon ready to spill out his red, pulpy insides — Raylan was there, offering him some ill-gotten M&Ms or the rest of his milkshake, his bare shoulder bumping Boyd’s. Raylan slid into all the chasms Boyd’s mama had left behind.

After that, Boyd blamed it on the funeral. Maybe he did search Raylan out in the halls, maybe he bullied his way into the space Raylan gathered around himself and dug his knuckles into Raylan’s hard head. But that was only because Raylan had been there when they put Boyd’s mama in the ground. Raylan’s grubby hands and his teasing gibes soothed the places Boyd’s mama wouldn’t ever again brush the hair soft behind his ear or kiss the scrapes on his knees. It had left Boyd filled with holes, his mama’s death; Raylan had stepped in, and anyone could have predicted that Boyd would get attached.

By fourteen Boyd could persuade most people to do most anything if they let him talk, but he never quite convinced himself that Raylan was just a comfort to a motherless boy. Not when Boyd had never wasted a day chasing a Crowder boy down the halls, never teased Johnny about diamonds and dresses or took Merle fishing when Uncle Cyrus beat his face black and blue. Not when Raylan could knock the words out of Boyd’s mouth like no one else could. Not when Raylan was the only one who could set Boyd spitting mad with his talk about betas, and why should Boyd Crowder care that the Givens boy called himself a freak?

 

He finally admitted it to himself at Evarts, knocked from his perch as king of the eighth-grade and demoted to a freshman adrift in a sea of bigger, meaner kids. All that new competition didn’t stop Raylan from shining, though. Boyd watched Raylan hunker down, swinging a bat with the whole town looking on. He watched the girls’ heads turn when Raylan walked by, glared at anyone who made a move into Raylan’s sacred space until Johnny shook Boyd’s shoulder and asked him what the hell was wrong.

It was that Raylan had a girl, Boyd reasoned. _Boyd_ should have girls after him; he was the alpha, and Raylan was only a beta –

But Boyd had never liked it when Raylan talked that sort of horseshit, and thinking it made his stomach ache and put bile in his throat.

Even so. Boyd was only jealous because of the girls.

He said as much, running his mouth like he always did around Raylan, _so much time on baseball and bitches, Raylan, and none left for me?_

Boyd had snapped his jaw shut, closed the gate with the words already galloping free. He waited for Raylan to roll his eyes and shove Boyd into the wall. _I’ll add you to my schedule,_ Raylan would say. _Do I put you with ‘baseball’, or ‘bitches’?_

Raylan didn’t say that. Raylan didn’t say anything, which was normal for Raylan but not normal for Raylan around _Boyd_.

After a few days, Boyd hoped the whole outburst — whining for scraps of Raylan’s time like a pup after his mother’s tit, _Jesus_ , Boyd was better than that — had been duly forgotten and they could maybe never mention it ever again.

Then Raylan said something.

“Oh,” Raylan said, like it was nothing and not the pin of a grenade. He’d glanced over at a cluster of sophomore girls, first, which was apparently enough to distract Raylan from their ongoing debate over whether they should root for the Redskins or the Steelers that season. Raylan, in his usual bull-headed way, kept advocating for the _Colts_ , who weren’t even a real team and played like omegas in heat. “I forgot – Friday –”

“Tomorrow?” Boyd corrected, arching his eyebrows. “The day after today?” Raylan slouched and rubbed the back of his neck, looking for all the world like a boy caught telling tales out of school.

“Yeah. Tomorrow. We’ve got a date.”

Boyd’s heart stopped. He might’ve died, then, shot for the first time; he sure as shit stopped breathing and rigor mortis felt like it set in.

That was –

But Raylan didn’t –

He couldn’t ...

Boyd’s words danced gleefully around his head, twirling just out of reach, unspoken things slotting sickeningly into place. Boyd thought he might vomit, or faint.

Raylan, who had a disconcerting talent for reading Boyd’s face even when he wasn’t _looking at it_ , certainly couldn’t help but notice that Boyd had faded to ash-white and would soon collapse into cinders on the floor.

“Boyd?” Raylan said hesitantly, cocking his head. “Didn’t you want –”

 _Did I?_ Boyd thought, rattled down to his bones. _And how did_ you _know, Raylan? How did you_ know _?_

“I mean,” Raylan stuttered, rocking back onto his heels and biting down on the inside of his cheek. “I told Gracie to bring her sister along, is all. I thought we could take ‘em to the drive-in, maybe head up to the ridge after that. But if you ain’t interested, I can tell Gracie not to –”

 “No,” Boyd wheezed, the only word he could articulate at that moment, the one he was using to shut down his brain before it raced to conclusions Boyd didn’t want to hear.

Raylan’s face fell, at Boyd’s response, mirroring the way Boyd’s organs were plummeting through the floor. Raylan, who had insisted Gracie bring her sister out so that Boyd could tag along.

Boyd swallowed hard and dragged his dead limbs back to life, forced the blood to start pumping through his severed veins. “I mean no, don’t call it off,” he told Raylan, rolling the words off his tongue like Shakespeare, like the hook for a new con.

“Gracie’s sister’s an omega, ain’t she? And smoking hot.” Boyd leered, and Raylan — who must have felt it was once again safe to treat Boyd without velvet gloves — kicked him in the ankle. “Wouldn’t be right to turn that away, not when you’ve gone to so much trouble to get me laid.”

Any other day, Boyd would have ended the sentence by slinging his arm over Raylan’s scrawny shoulders, the perfect punctuation mark to any phrase. Raylan was even expecting it, bent sideways like he’d sprouted with a crooked spine.

Boyd took a step backwards and didn’t meet Raylan’s eyes.

“Promised my daddy I’d pick something up,” Boyd fabricated, an expert at lying to anyone but Raylan. “Need to get on that. I’ll see you tomorrow, Raylan.”

He thought he heard Raylan shout after him, but Boyd was already sprinting for the doors. He could get one of the Bennetts to sell him a dime bag of something, maybe, anything to prevent his brain from telling him what it had learned about Boyd’s reckless, stupid heart.

* * *

The next night Raylan came by Boyd’s house straight after practice. He commandeered the Crowders’ bath and one of Boyd’s nice shirts easy as you please, like there had never been a possibility that Bo Crowder would have run him off the property with a gun. He shouted through the door that if he was supplying the women Boyd best supply the good time, so Boyd went to the cupboard for the moonshine and diligently ignored Bowman’s slurred assertion that Boyd was “Givens’s _bitch_.”

They had an hour to kill before they needed to climb back in Raylan’s truck. Bowman’s friends had thankfully taken him off to raise some hell while Bo was up doing business in the hills, so he and Raylan kicked back on the porch steps with Aunt Betty’s tasteless biscuits and a jar of ‘shine. Raylan’s hair was wet from the shower. He had used Boyd’s cheap soap, Boyd’s deodorant. He had Boyd’s aftershave splashed too liberally onto his face. Raylan smelled like Boyd; it was _Boyd_ that Gracie would scent on Raylan’s skin.

Eventually, they rolled to their feet and drove into town to pick up the girls and go to the drive-in. They climbed out to get popcorn and sodas for the girls, shoving and laughing and standing in line like it was the two of them out to the movies on a beautiful Friday night.

Once the film started, Raylan wrapped his arm around Gracie, then tilted his head to give Boyd the stink eye until Boyd slid his arm around Laura’s small shoulders, the back of his hand brushing Raylan’s.

Laura smelled like lollipops, something sugary and too sweet. She wasn’t on sups, that was clear, and Boyd was glad for the condom tucked into the back pocket of his jeans. Boyd hovered over her in the bed of Raylan’s truck, uncertain what to do with one girl underneath him and two more people a sheet of glass away.

“You two take the back,” Raylan had said a few minutes earlier, lifting his head from where he’d been mauling Gracie’s mouth and sliding his hand under her sweater to cup her generous breast. “I’m used to the cab.”

He was _used to_ the cab. There’d been girls before Gracie, in that cab. Raylan had taken other girls up to the ridge, had claimed their mouths and pulled off their clothes and –

“Come here,” Boyd growled, pressing Laura up against the back window so that Raylan could see him strip her out of her flowered shirt, so that he could watch Raylan bury his face between Gracie’s tits, listen to Raylan groan when Gracie followed the condom onto his slender beta dick. Boyd nearly popped his knot inside Laura when Raylan’s face went slack, the air so thick that Boyd could practically taste the scent of Raylan’s come, licked his lips and admitted what he already knew.

There were more girls, but after that night Boyd stopped looking away when he met Raylan’s eyes.

* * *

So. Boyd Crowder was knot-blown for a beta. A _male_ beta. No matter how much shit he sold Raylan about the dawning of the future and the twilight of the twentieth century, Raylan was right: that sort of thing wasn’t done in Harlan County. It certainly wasn’t done in the Crowder family. Not the beta mate, and not the boy.

Maybe, _maybe_ Bo Crowder would let it slide — wouldn’t drown him in the creek, Boyd thought, and wouldn’t it be funny if Raylan’s dire predictions came true — if the beta was a girl, and Boyd proved he could crush her under his heel, put a claim on her that would scar all down her throat.

Which would all be very well and good, if a little barbaric and probably the subject of a Southern gothic horror novel, if only the beta in question wasn’t _Raylan_.

Raylan, who had refused to respond when the teacher had nicknamed him ‘Ray’, and so came close to repeating first grade until Mrs. Scroggins gave in and called him by his full name, _Raylan Givens_ , for the rest of the year.

Raylan, who had punched a bigger boy in the face at recess, when the boy had asked if only Raylan’s daddy was allowed to hit him, or could anybody take a swing?

Raylan, who at ten years old wanted to ruffle all of Harlan’s feathers with a project on Ulysses S. Grant.

Raylan, who didn’t crack a smile when the varsity coach praised his arm and his swing, but who spent hours spinning his dreams to Boyd, who vowed that once he turned eighteen and the scouts signed him to a farm league he was lighting out of Harlan County and never looking back.

Boyd might as well wish down the moon as wish for Raylan Givens to bare his throat and stay. The moon always returned to Harlan, in the end, but Raylan swore he never would.

Boyd specialized in the impossible: last month he had cajoled severe Ms. Markham to let them have class outside; at Christmas he had sung angels’ choir in the pine trees and scared Bowman into a church, praying for his soul. But there was the impossible, and then there was Raylan.

“You’re awfully quiet today,” Raylan murmured, nudging his knee against Boyd’s, both of them bent over the same textbook trying to finish their math homework before the bell. Homework in the library during lunch was the only time Boyd and Raylan had to themselves anymore, away from teammates and Crowder kin and willing girls. “You stumped by geometry, or are you planning to blow up another stash of fireworks?”

The librarian glared at them from behind her desk, and Raylan flashed Boyd a conspiratorial grin.

“Why Raylan, I’m mightily offended at your insinuations that I blew up anything at all.” Raylan snorted, and Boyd smiled wide enough to make his cheeks ache. “Besides,” Boyd whispered, leaning in. “Wasn’t it the best New Year’s show you’d ever seen?”

“It’s _March_ ,” Raylan said, his face stern and eyes sparkling with laughter. “Where’d you even get fireworks this time of year?”

“Are you angling for a confession?” Boyd queried, facetious. Raylan chuckled, earning them another glare, and shook his head.

“Just trying to clear my schedule for the next show,” he replied, with the same small smile he gave Boyd prior to every shared date. “Now are you going to explain what a hot air balloon has in common with a running dog, or are you going to waste the rest of my lunch hour staring into space?”

“It’s that they form a series of expanding triangles,” Boyd huffed, skidded his chair around to Raylan’s side of the table with a clatter that drew the librarian’s ire. “It’s not about the dog, Raylan.”

“Oh,” Raylan said blandly, as though Boyd couldn’t see the smirk edging across his lips. “So it’s about the balloon?”

They got detention for fighting in the library again, but baseball practice was cancelled on account of rain, so neither boy much begrudged the time.

* * *

Boyd started at the mine the summer before their senior year, no matter that Raylan had spent _months_ detailing all the reasons why Boyd should stay above ground where he belonged. He’d even written them down on notebook paper, during a lunch where Boyd thought they were writing essays on _Titus Andronicus_.

(They’d both failed that particular assignment. Raylan hadn’t turned his in, though he _had_ titled it: “A Million Reasons Boyd Crowder is a Moron.” Boyd had decided writing an essay was too juvenile, so chose to pass the time rewriting the play with Mags Bennett as Tamora and the Sheriff as Titus. Which didn’t work so well, seeing as the sheriff took his orders from Bo. “Where have all the honest lawmen gone?” he sung mournfully, “long time passing,” and Raylan smacked him with the play.)

It wasn’t that Boyd hadn’t heard him, Raylan knew. Boyd had listened intently as Raylan ranted at him in the halls at school, in notes passed during class and in the cab of Raylan’s truck on the way to pick up their girls for the night. Hell, sometimes Raylan ranted them home after the date, when worrying about Boyd ruined the buzz of sex and a shared cigarette. It wasn’t that Boyd didn’t know about black lung and inadequate safety gear and subpar machinists and foremen willing to work a man till he keeled over dead. Boyd wasn’t _ignorant_. He was just ornery.

“Oh, Raylan.” Boyd doubled over, laughing too hard to stand. “And here I thought you didn’t know the meaning of that word.”

“Shut up,” Raylan snapped, folding his arms across his chest and refusing to smile. “You could work at Gilliam’s.”

“I believe that job’s taken,” Boyd replied solemnly, straightening up and leaning against Raylan’s truck, his slim fingers jammed in the front pockets of his jeans.

“I’ll quit, then. I’ll tell Mr. Gilliam to hire you instead.” Raylan wrapped his fingers around his upper arms, dug his stubby fingernails into the skin so he didn’t give into the urge to punch Boyd for being so goddamned dumb. “There’s free ice cream,” he offered. “And it’s decent pay.”

“Not as good as the mines,” Boyd said gently, the same company line he’d spouted since telling Raylan his plans. Now it was the last day of school, kids scattered through the parking lot talking about their summer plans. “Raylan.” Boyd could write a whole speech, Raylan believed, saying nothing but Raylan's name. “Bowman’s good,” he said, stupidly proud. “Good enough to make varsity.”

“Didn’t make it last year,” Raylan grouched, even angrier when Boyd aimed that proud look at _him_ , like Raylan being the only freshman to make a varsity team in ten years gave Boyd any cause to smile.

“Yes, well, we can’t all of us aspire to your lofty heights.” Raylan gave him a look. Boyd had a tendency to start talking like he was Will Shakespeare come to preach the Word, and it had gotten bad enough that Raylan was starting to talk like that himself, his mama worried he was coming home high.

“All right,” Boyd conceded. “But we’ve had this out every which way. Coach won’t let Bowman play varsity without summer football camp. Camp costs money. Shoes cost money. Uniforms cost money. Traveling to games costs money.”

“Yes, I am aware of such expenses, seeing as I have to pay for all of them myself. If Bowman wants to play, he should get his own damn summer job.”

Boyd took a deep breath, a sure sign he was rolling past _forbearing_ and right into _madder than a wet hen_. “I know that you heard me when I said _summer_ camp, as I have said those words to you before.”

 _So make your daddy pay, if it’s his alpha son who’s good enough to go pro_ , Raylan wanted to bark, but he’d said that a hundred times already, and Boyd had threatened to brain him with the Crowder ledgers if he had to tell Raylan one more time that what with the federal crackdown last year, business was slow. And then Raylan would explode, bursting with all that mad, and Boyd would fight like a weasel with teeth and nails and they’d both finish bloody in the dirt. Or in the halls. Or, memorably, on the floor of the movie theater while their dates watched.

Despite what Boyd would no doubt say, Raylan wasn’t itching for another fight. He sighed, tried to stamp the anger out through his tennis shoes and tug it out of his hair. “All right,” he surrendered, mimicking Boyd. “All right. Dig your way to hell for Bowman’s cleats if you wanna, it’s none of my concern.”

“Now, Raylan,” Boyd started, frowning, but Raylan didn’t want to fight.

“You want to go fishing?” he interrupted, because it was the last day before summer sucked Boyd down into the mines, Raylan’s last chance to have this, and it wasn’t worth sacrificing for a chance to win a fight. “Earl Ray promised me a cold six-pack if I stopped by before dark. I might even have some firecrackers you can shoot at the fish.”

Boyd went taut as a bow string ready to snap, tense as a pup who’d tipped over his mother’s china cabinet, cringing in anticipation of the crash. Boyd had invaded Raylan’s space years ago and never left, and Raylan could read the answer in the crystalline quality of the silence and the apology scrawled across Boyd’s face.

“Huh,” he said, and blamed his tight throat on the dust, or some new side effect from the sups. He’d been fighting with Boyd for months, whenever they weren’t occupied with school or kin or girls. Of course Boyd would be glad to see him gone.

“Well, then. Guess I’ll be on my way.” He settled the baseball cap back onto his head and swallowed a few times while he pretended to search for his keys. “You have a nice summer, Boyd Crowder.” Raylan tugged his brim and turned to walk away.

Then slender fingers clamped tight as a steel cable around his wrist, and he didn’t dare move.

“Don’t you do that, Raylan,” Boyd warned, alpha thrumming through his words and pulsing under the calluses on his palms.

Raylan cursed his biology and hunched his shoulders to resist baring his neck. He didn’t try to pull his hand away. There was no point: he couldn’t move until Boyd let him go. He’d thought the sups prevented this sort of thing — he’d never felt compelled to heed his daddy, even after he’d turned fourteen — but maybe the alpha had to be touching his skin. Or maybe he needed to up his dose. Raylan wished _again_ that Health class had devoted more time to their sinful human bodies and less time to God.

Fortunately, Boyd seemed startled by his sudden display of dominance, and let go of Raylan’s wrist without Raylan having to ask. He even retreated a step, that space the sincerest apology Boyd Crowder ever gave.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” Boyd said softly. _Didn’t mean to turn me down?_ Raylan wondered, rubbing his wrist. _Or didn’t mean to make me obey?_ “You know very well that I would love nothing more than to help empty Earl Ray’s cooler and lay waste to some unsuspecting trout. However, my afternoon is regrettably full.” Boyd glanced across the lot to where Johnny was pitching balls Merle couldn’t hope to hit, and Bowman was throwing a football at the wall and flexing for the cheerleaders nearby. Of course. The Crowder gang.

Raylan still did not appreciate having his afternoon coopted by idiots, but Boyd hadn’t decided that Raylan wasn’t worth his time, and Raylan’s stomach felt less like it was filled with rocks.

“Perhaps later this evening?” Boyd hazarded, careful to keep both hands off of Raylan and the alpha out of his voice.

“I suppose I could cancel my prior plans,” Raylan said, feigning reluctance. “I’ll pick you up after supper, then, by the old barn?”

“Not tonight,” Boyd told him, and didn’t bother to hide his grin. “Tonight I’m driving.” Boyd started to walk away, then twisted to toss Raylan a wink. “I’ll pick you up at eight, Raylan, and I do hope you’ll be wearing that red dress.”

“You’re an asshole, Boyd Crowder!” Raylan hollered after, and just because he was laughing didn’t mean it wasn’t true.

When he got home, the first thing Raylan did was swallow another sup. Boyd was the only one who came close enough to touch, really, and he’d never commanded Raylan before, but if Boyd could do it then maybe Arlo could, too, and that was plenty of reason to up the dose.

* * *

Boyd extricated himself from the clutches of his family shortly after scooping a fair helping of Aunt Etta’s mashed potatoes down his throat. They were easier to swallow if you didn’t try to chew, so that you could pretend to be unaware of the raw bits of potato lurking in the pot. This tactic allowed Boyd to launch out of his chair while Bowman was still moaning about the uncooked potato wedged in his tooth.

“What lit your ass on fire, son?” Bo Crowder inquired, pulling another dry pork chop onto his plate. “You got an omega on the hook?”

“Um.” Boyd had not expected his daddy to be home. Aunt Etta wasn’t hard to dodge, as long as Boyd didn’t walk in front of the TV, and Bowman had been crowing all week about wrangling an invitation to the end-of-year bonfire up on the Kirby’s land. Boyd had offered Johnny an entire carton of cigarettes, if he took Boyd’s little brother to the party and kept him out of Boyd’s hair, but that was a detail Bowman did not need to know. “I –”

Speaking of vexatious, black-hearted little brothers: “Bet he’s meetin’ _Raylan_ ,” Bowman singsonged, his irritatingly large mouth full of gravy and dinner rolls. “Prob’ly takin’ his boy up to the ridge.”

Bowman was getting bigger by the day, but Boyd was quicker, and his brother didn’t see the blow coming till Boyd had clouted him hard with the lid from the nearest pot.

“Boys,” Bo admonished, when Bowman made to stand up and pay back the blow. “Put your teeth away.”

Bowman switched from regular speech to alpha growls at the slightest provocation, dropped his incisors at insults no one had thought to give. Boy had no control, Boyd lamented, then thought of his hand around Raylan’s wrist and cringed. Bowman wasn’t the only Crowder needing to learn control.

“You still hanging around that Givens get?” Boyd’s daddy asked mildly, and Boyd forced himself not to flinch and back away. _You can’t trust nobody but kin, son_. It was the Crowders’ first commandment, _worship no gods but Crowder gods_ , and Boyd had memorized it years before he’d lost his milk teeth.

“What can I say?” Boyd replied, with an insouciant shrug. “I’m a practical man, and you and Bowman are both right.” Bowman’s eyes looked ready to pop clear out of his head, at that. “There’s sweet lips and a wet pussy waiting for me, and if I want to take her up the ridge, it’s Raylan who has the truck. Don’t you view his daddy’s _utility_ the same way?”

Dreadful, stone-faced silence followed this pronouncement, but Boyd was in the business of the impossible, and a moment later Bo Crowder began to laugh, slapping the table so hard that Bowman’s knife clattered off his plate.

“You’d make your granddaddy proud,” Bo chortled, and Bowman glared resentfully at Boyd. “We’ll have you running the family business yet.”

There it was. The carrot and the stick. Boyd’s granddaddy might be proud, but Boyd’s daddy was none too pleased that — when Boyd had announced he wanted a summer job — he had turned down Bo’s offer to act as a collection agent for the Crowder family operations. Boyd had told his father that Johnny and Merle could count money and swing a bat, and if Bo wanted to hire Boyd, it would be for something farther up the hierarchy than breaking knees.

Bo Crowder had smacked him down and accused him of being uppity, which was a far sight better than accusing him of being smitten with a boy who insisted Boyd was meant for better things.

He was too smart for low pay and mindless thuggery, that was all. No one needed to know that his inner uppity self had a tendency to sound like Raylan. _C’mon, Boyd, you’re too smart for your daddy’s two-bit criminal empire. What, you’re going to calculate expanding triangles from meth trailers and quote Locke to drunken thugs?_

“- thought it was about time I bought myself a new truck,” Bo concluded. He peered expectantly at Boyd, who hadn’t heard a word the man had said. “You gone stupid, Boyd? Are you gonna take these keys and thank me or not?” He held out his hand, impatiently jingling the keys in question.

“Thank you,” Boyd said, because he wasn’t an idiot, and took the keys. The keys to his daddy’s truck, Boyd realized, twisting them between his fingers. He had been planning to borrow his aunt’s Aries — a car that would doubtlessly ruin a date, when the girl saw it and refused to get in, but Raylan wasn’t a girl and was therefore less likely to balk and more likely to wet his pants laughing at Boyd’s granny car — but he’d happily borrow the truck instead. “I’ll have it back by morning,” he promised quickly, because it was going on seven thirty and he didn’t want to be late.

Bo stared suspiciously at his oldest son, though he appeared to suspect Boyd of sniffing leaded gasoline and not of wanting to be on time for an evening with the Givens boy. “I expect Bowman to be slow,” their daddy intoned –

“Hey!” Bowman interjected, canines dropping, then subsided at their father’s quelling look.

“– but I had hoped that one of you might not be dumber than a box of rocks.” Boyd blinked, gathering his rebuttal to that, but thankfully his daddy saw fit to repeat what Boyd had obviously missed. “I bought a new truck this morning over in Lexington,” Bo reiterated. “So have the truck back by morning or wrap it around a tree, boy, I don’t care. It’s your truck now.”

“Thank you, Daddy,” Boyd said again, with far more sincerity. “And now, I must adieu.” He glanced at the kitchen clock. Seven forty. If he didn’t bother to change his shirt, there would be time to duck around the back and snatch the bottle of cheap whiskey he’d hidden in the shed.

“Don’t you be thinking that truck is free, son!” Bo shouted after him, louder than the clattering of the screen door. He wasn’t saying anything Boyd didn’t already know. Bo Crowder never handed out a favor he didn’t intend to call in.

 

“You’re late,” Raylan announced, tossing the cooler in the back of Boyd’s new truck and swinging into the passenger seat. “And did you steal your daddy’s truck?”

Boyd stuck his head out the driver’s window and waved at the two women smoking on the porch, Helen staying with them and renting out her house for money while Arlo served his time in the penitentiary upstate. “You ladies have a good evening,” he said politely, and Aunt Helen’s scowl couldn’t dampen his good mood.

“You drive safe now, Boyd Crowder,” Mrs. Givens — Aunt Frances, she insisted, closer to Boyd’s mama than kin — replied, returning his wave. “I put some chicken and biscuits in that cooler for you, and some cherry pie. You make sure Raylan shares.” Mrs. Givens was a _saint_.

“Do you know the last time I had pie?” Boyd sighed happily, jolting them into reverse and tearing back out of the drive. “Do you, Raylan?”

Raylan made an offensive noise in response, and shook his head. “You don’t deserve pie, making off with your daddy’s truck.”

“I’ll have you know that this vehicle is one hundred and ten percent mine,” Boyd bragged, giving the cracked dashboard an affectionate pat. “A gift, for being my daddy’s smartest son.”

“You ain’t got much competition there,” Raylan muttered, but he said it low so that Boyd could pretend not to hear. Then he stilled and didn’t say another word. And Boyd hadn’t anticipated congratulations, not from Raylan, but when it came to Raylan Givens there was good quiet and there was bad quiet, and this particular silence did not strike Boyd as _good_.

“Raylan?” he prompted, taking his eyes off the dirt road for a moment to squint through the dark at his friend. “You don’t like my truck?”

“’s a piece of shit,” Raylan answered reflexively, and Boyd huffed a laugh through his nose.

“But it’ll do, I suppose,” he said, in a tone raised the hairs on Boyd’s arms and tightened his fingers on the wheel. Raylan turned so that he was speaking to the passenger window, and not to Boyd, set his next words out careful as a man arming a landmine. “Guess this means you don’t need to double up with me, anymore, to take girls out to the ridge.”

Boyd swerved left, swung the truck off the road and smoked the brakes before cutting the engine and saving Mrs. Givens’s cherry pie from a fiery death in the woods.

Shit.

In their partnership, it was Boyd who considered all the contingencies, and yet it hadn’t even crossed his mind. They doubled up on their dates — _all_ their dates — because Boyd didn’t have a car of his own. That’s what they told the girls, but the girls never complained: hens were always happier in a brood. That’s what Boyd told his daddy, and Boyd’s daddy had given him a truck. Boyd had snatched at the carrot, and clear forgotten about the stick.

“Well, I –”

Boyd tapered off. Raylan’s jaw clicked, but Boyd kicked him in the leg before Raylan could open his mouth and ruin things like he nearly had that afternoon, tip his hat and say something stupid like “good bye.”

“I don’t know about that,” he continued slowly, peering around corners to work his way out of the labyrinthine difficulty they found themselves in.

Raylan radiated skepticism like omegas in heat radiated pheromones. Boyd stifled a laugh that would assuredly send Raylan flying clear off the handle. If betas gave off any scent at all, Raylan would smell like sarcasm and oil worked into the leather of a baseball glove.

“I mean, gas prices are like to rise,” Boyd conjectured, “what with all that nonsense from the EPA, and the election coming this fall.”

“You’re saying privacy ain’t worth the price of gas?” Raylan huffed, rolling his eyes in exasperation the way he did every time Boyd mentioned the EPA.

“I didn’t say that,” Boyd rebutted, annoyed. He was trying, dammit, and the least Raylan could do was shut up, if he wasn’t going to help. Unless, maybe –

“Is that what you want?” Boyd asked warily, because he didn’t know what he would do if the answer was ‘yes’. “Privacy?”

“What?” Raylan swung around, eyes wide as saucers in the dark. “No!” He sounded shocked at the very idea, and Boyd let out the breath caught in his chest. Raylan might be leaving for big cities and bright stadium lights come next spring, but Boyd intended to soak up every moment he could until then. “I mean,” Raylan amended, but Boyd didn’t wait to find out how that sentence would end.

If he gave Raylan too much time to think, the boy would persuade himself into a different answer, sure that normal teenage boys wanted their trucks and their dates to themselves. Raylan placed too much store in normalcy, Boyd thought, so eager to fit in to the sitcom version of a big-city life that he stood out in Harlan like a sore thumb.

“We get more pussy when we double up,” Boyd stated confidently. If Boyd could make himself believe it, he could convince everyone else. “You know how girls are, always more willing to do shit if their friend is doing it, too.”

Raylan chuckled, slid away from where he’d pressed himself flat against his door and back toward the middle of the bench seat. “I don’t know a damn thing about girls,” he confessed, not sounding too bothered by his ignorance. “And neither do you. Now are you going to put this truck back on the road, or do you need me to drive?”

“Fuck you,” Boyd retorted, twisting the key and revving the engine obnoxiously loud, since Raylan wouldn’t be able to see Boyd flipping him the bird.

Raylan grinned, a flash of white teeth in the dark, and stretched his arms along the back of the seat, knocking his hand into Boyd’s neck. It had been months, Boyd realized, since Raylan had smiled that wide. Boyd hadn’t noticed — too busy arguing about the mines, or avoiding Raylan because he was tired of picking the same fight.

Raylan smiled, open and easy, and Boyd felt forty pounds lighter than he had all spring.

“I’m off Mondays,” Boyd said, pulling back onto the road and up the hill. “You got Sunday night free? We could take Carol and Marla to the dance hall up in Cumberland, if you do.”

“Yeah, all right,” Raylan agreed, after a pause. “On one condition, though.” Boyd glanced over, raised an eyebrow urging Raylan on. “I’m driving. You’d put us down in the ravine.”

“Shut your mouth, son,” Boyd said, and fishtailed the truck around the next curve.

* * *

They’d kicked Earl Ray’s six-pack of beer early on, used it to wash down the chicken and biscuits before turning to dessert. Boyd claimed that Mrs. Givens’s baked goods required a fresh palate, and Raylan called him a pretentious asshole and leaned in close so he could see Boyd’s face when the boy reached into the cooler and discovered that Raylan’s mama had given them the whole pie.

Raylan might have had a little to do with that. Could be that he’d come home from school the day before — still planning to spend the afternoon with Boyd, then — and kissed his mama on the cheek; said he might be seeing Boyd Crowder that weekend, and did she know that Boyd said his Aunt Frances made the best cherry pie in three counties, how there hadn’t been dessert in the Crowder house since Clary had died?

“You’re sure shoveling that shit on thick,” his Aunt Helen had noted, lighting a fresh cigarette and watching Raylan with keen eyes. “You that desperate to please the Crowder pup?” She blew out a steady stream of smoke and shook her head. “If you worked any harder to impress him, boy, you’d already be mated and bred.”

Raylan’s fingers clenched on the top rung of his mama’s chair at Aunt Helen’s insinuations, his mama twisted around to pat worriedly at his bloodless hands. Aunt Helen was only making fun. She didn’t know. Nobody knew but Raylan’s mama and the folks at the Lexington clinic three hours away.

“Merciful bounty,” Boyd exhaled, drawing Raylan out of his reverie. He was cradling the pie with both hands like it was the pastor’s sacred chalice, eyes bright as a pup’s. Raylan’s chest warmed and his neck flushed red, the way it always did during games when he knocked the ball into the outfield and Boyd hollered louder than a whole damn stadium, whistling Raylan around the bases and home. “Raylan, I believe I would like to marry your mother.”

That shocked a laugh out of Raylan, and Boyd watched him with a triumphant smile. “You asking for my blessing?” he wondered, pulling the cooler over to dig out the forks he’d packed, his mama muttering about uncivilized, poorly housebroken boys when he told her they didn’t need plates or a knife. “Because — while I am certain you’re a fine catch for any woman — I believe the great state of Kentucky frowns upon bigamy.”

“You may have a point,” Boyd admitted, setting the pie between them on the blanket and grabbing for a fork. “Do you think she might adopt me? According to your daddy we’re all whelped from incestuous hill clans, and therefore must be kin.”

“Eat your pie, you inbred hillbilly,” Raylan retorted, and Boyd swooped low to steal the first bite off Raylan’s fork.

There wasn’t much talking for a while after that, nothing but crickets chirping, owls hooting in the distance, and the scrape of forks against the pie pan. Occasionally Boyd interrupted with noises that Raylan knew for a fact he only made during sex. By the time they finished the pie they’d also finished half the whiskey, and Raylan found himself laying on his back, one hand folded under his head and one rubbing his stomach, complaining about half a handle of cheap whiskey and too much pie.

“Tell me your daddy left some blankets under the seat,” he said, rolling his head to look at Boyd. It was easier to see, now that the moon had troubled itself to climb out from behind the trees. “Because, Boyd, you are too drunk to drive.”

Boyd laughed, short and sharp, a whip crack sound that made most people jump, unsettled their nerves. “If you say so,” he agreed, amiable.

Generally, Boyd being amiable was cause to worry, but since Boyd had just tumbled off the side of the truck face-first into the grass, Raylan imagined Harlan County could rest safe from any mischief Boyd might dream up. The truck door creaked open, followed quickly by a victory cry.

“Sleeping bags!” Boyd announced enthusiastically, then chucked one onto Raylan’s head. “And bourbon.”

“We don’t need the bourbon,” Raylan groaned, hauling himself up far enough to untie the sleeping bag and roll it out, wrinkling his nose at the smell of old fabric and new mold. “Besides, don’t you start work tomorrow?”

“Graveyard shift,” Boyd answered, tossing a second bag in and hoisting himself clumsily back into the bed. “I’ve got all day tomorrow to regret what I drink tonight.”

Raylan unzipped the sleeping bag and stretched out across musty flannel that smelled awful but was worlds softer than the rusty truck bed. He bent his legs to tug off his shoes without untying them and chucked them down to the end of the truck. He debated zipping himself back in, but it wasn’t that cold and the bag needed all the airing out it could get.

While Raylan had been arranging everything to his satisfaction, Boyd had disappeared into his own sleeping bag, shoes still on and only his hair sticking out the top. Raylan smiled, _fond_ , and would’ve blamed it on biology only he’d swallowed a suppressant that afternoon, so he could only blame it on the drink. He did manage to resist sliding his fingers through Boyd’s unruly hair.

Christ. No wonder omegas were so damn useless, if they melted over any available alpha that gave them the time of day. Raylan was lucky he only had one alpha friend.

“Don’t discriminate, Raylan,” Boyd declared, voice muffled by the sleeping bag until his head popped out, eyes bright. “I could be a beta and you’d still only have the one friend.”

Raylan choked on his own air — he had been talking _out loud_? — but Boyd didn’t look like a man who had just discovered the first male omega in Harlan County. Boyd looked bleary-eyed and drunk, elbow propping up his head and his lopsided smirk, pleased to have named himself Raylan’s only friend.

“Maybe I’ll make a new friend this summer,” Raylan blustered, staring at the bulbous moon over their heads. “To keep the number steady at one, after you get slabbed in the mine.”

“Raylan.” Boyd wielded his name like a cool washcloth on tear-stained cheeks, like aloe on a skinned knee, and it made Raylan’s chest tight and his hands curl into fists, angry at Boyd for daring to sound so kind. “I don’t understand,” he added softly, and that was a tactic he hadn’t used in any of their other fights about Boyd dying in a mine. In fact, Raylan couldn’t think of a time that Boyd had admitted a world existed beyond his ken.

“Don’t understand mining?” Raylan retorted, needling Boyd out of his damned compassion and into a fight. “Or dying?”

“ _Raylan_.” And there it was, Boyd’s waning patience, Raylan’s name the swat on a misbehaving child’s hand, the siren warning for a tornado fulminating over their heads. “As we are children whelped in the same holler, we certainly aren’t strangers to mining. And as for dying — well, didn’t our daddies raise us for that?”

“I’m too tired for your hick philosophy,” Raylan grumbled, rolling onto his side and away from Boyd, staring at the plaid pattern on the flannel till his eyes crossed.

“What I don’t understand,” Boyd continued, undeterred, “is why you’re so convinced the former will lead to the latter. There hasn’t been a fatal cave-in or an explosion in Harlan for over a decade, and I’m certain you can’t name anyone of our acquaintance who’s died in the mines.”

“Audie Marsee,” Raylan spat, before remembering that he’d decided not to talk to Boyd.

“Jesus fucking Christ.” Raylan turned back over, because it sounded like he had finally goaded Boyd past enduring. Boyd scowled at him from the lip of his sleeping bag. “Audie Marsee’s unfortunate demise occurred after his brother dared him to _slide down the elevator cable like James Bond_ , and I’m sure you’re not implying that my higher reasoning is on par with his.”

“Is it implying if I say it outright?” Raylan was curious to see if Boyd’s cheeks could flush any darker, or if he’d start breathing fire instead.

“Let’s try this again,” Boyd sighed, rolling onto his stomach and propping himself up on his elbows so he could inspect Raylan as if Raylan were the ant and Boyd was holding the magnifying glass. “Raylan Givens, why are you so afraid of the mines?”

If Boyd had been anyone else, Raylan would have kicked in his ribs for daring to suggest that he might be _afraid_. Raylan wasn’t scared of his daddy and he wasn’t scared of slipping up with his pills so that someone caught his scent and he wasn’t scared to wake up one day and find the tombstone filled in, _Raylan Givens 1970-1988_ , and himself under the ground. And if he wasn’t scared of all that, then why would he be afraid of the mines?

But it was Boyd, laying there like he could wait days for Raylan’s answer, could wait out all the barbs that Raylan tossed his way. Boyd, who in fourth grade had agreed to do a project on Harlan’s most hated president. Boyd, who’d shared his candy the day his mama died, who bought a sundae two years later and split it with Raylan. Boyd, who’d come to every baseball game since seventh grade and had somehow convinced his cousin Johnny that he had an abiding love for the game.

Of course, just because it was Boyd didn’t mean that Raylan knew what to say. Boyd was right; Uncle Silas’s horror stories about evil company men and failing safety gear were the closest Raylan had come to a gruesome death in the mines. But he’d grown up in Harlan, same as Boyd, watched folks wane, pale as maggots from working days underground. Watched folks fill their lungs up with coal dust and tobacco until they finally choked and died. _Once you’re down in her coal-rotten belly_ , Raylan knew — the way he knew to lock the door when he heard his daddy’s boots on the stairs — _Harlan will bury you alive_.

“When I was twelve,” he finally said, “and daddy set out those tombstones in the yard ...

“I believed for a long time that he’d done it so I’d know where to dig my grave. That he’d put a shovel in my hands before he put me down.”

Raylan stared up at Boyd and Boyd peered down at Raylan, a wrinkle between his brows and disquiet in his dark eyes. _He doesn’t get it_ , Raylan thought, resigned. Nobody did. Probably nobody ever would, just one more thing that separated Raylan, that made him into a freak.

Then Boyd’s gaze cleared, the crisp front of a storm after weeks of stagnant heat. Raylan looked away. It was worse, Boyd thinking he had boiled Raylan down and getting it wrong. Boyd would spout something about Raylan fearing his daddy's fists, and Raylan didn’t want to hear that his friend hadn’t understood.

“[Where the sun comes up](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd9BTZ3TTLk).” Boyd responded to Raylan’s confession in a high baritone that blended with the hum of the crickets and the susurrus of the night breeze; and Boyd never sang, these days, not since his daddy had complained that he sounded more like a gelding than an alpha boy. “At ten in the morning. And the sun goes down, about three in the day.”

Raylan’s mouth lifted in a tentative half-smile, exhaling slowly to keep the air from catching in his throat and the moisture out of his eyes. Boyd _had_ understood. Of course he had — Boyd always did understand everything Raylan couldn’t say.

“And you fill your cup with what bitter brew you’re drinking.” Raylan added his voice to the chorus, passed the whiskey bottle to Boyd and let his fingers brush across the back of Boyd’s hand, lingering over bony knuckles and tanned skin. “ _And you spend your life, just trying to get away_.”

Raylan’s eyes slipped shut. He could breathe now that there was nothing left of their fight, nothing roiling in the space between them, months of Raylan’s neck and shoulders aching where he’d wound them too tight. Boyd was still going into the mines, tomorrow, but he’d come back up for air on Sunday and settle into Raylan’s truck where he belonged, arm slung loose around Sunday’s girl and smiling across the cab at Raylan.

Boyd was singing [ballads](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwVLpsgAe8E) to the hills beside him, and Raylan was driving them north to Cumberland in his mind, cocooned by the hum of Boyd’s voice and the hum of the road, everything blurring together until it all drifted away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm personally fond of the Patty Loveless version of "You'll Never Leave Harlan Alive," but it's written by Darrell Scott (and he's the artist singing it in the actual TV show), so his version is [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cco-pCb0klU), and there's a nice version with him and other artists [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtSLMGc4VSA).
> 
> For two playlist options from YouTube for Boyd's "ballads to the hills," see [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrPTrkpO6EQ&list=PL7C924A91D47257E1) or [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STzoTmbemvA&list=PLy4cr7LaCUZLfh3wMKYOo-PaYAb0PVLaJ).


	3. Chapter 3

The mist made it almost impossible to see the entrance to the mine, a damp chill in the gray half-light, the faint pinks of dawn limning the ridge. It wouldn’t last: the sun rose quickly in August, burned the fog out of the hollers by mid-morning, baked the ground and all the folks in the county by midday.

Raylan stared hard at the doors where he _thought_ the entrance was, rapping his knuckles on the hood of his truck, shifting from foot to foot before pacing the few feet between his truck and Boyd’s. What in tarnation was Boyd _doing_ down there that took so long? Christ, night shift ended at seven, and it was already –

Raylan lifted his wrist, tugged up his sleeve to read his watch.

... six forty-five.

Raylan let out a growl worthy of an alpha, and stomped around the entire parking lot in the hopes that his footsteps would rattle down into the mine and send everybody home until the tremors cleared.

The parking lot was about four times the size it had appeared to be when Raylan had pulled in through the fog a few hours ago, and by the time he circled around to his truck there was a scrawny, coal-dark miner leaning against the grill, spinning his hardhat idly between his hands.

“You’re late,” Raylan said, striding past Boyd and jerking the handle on his door with enough force to wrench it clean off, and send him flying backward into the mirror on Boyd’s truck.

Boyd arched his eyebrows, coal dust streaked across his forehead and his left cheek. “It would appear so,” he replied cautiously, moving slowly, as though Raylan was a copperhead about to strike. “Though, seeing how I make very few appointments at this hour, you will have to remind me just what it is that I am late _for_.”

“Jimmie Louise.” Raylan hawked the name out of his throat, spat it into the dirt with a satisfying splat.

“Ah.” Boyd’s expression darkened with recognition, and he hitched his bag higher on his shoulder and swept his hat toward his truck with an abbreviated bow. “I assume this is a conversation we should continue in my humble vehicle?”

Raylan scowled at Boyd, then at the closed door of his truck and the handle he'd ripped off, still clutched in his hand.

“We’ll drive to the house for your daddy’s toolbox and come back, okay?” Boyd offered tiredly. “But I haven’t eaten for six hours and I have been in a _coal mine_ since last night, Raylan,” he said, Raylan’s name the rapidly fraying end of the rope, “so do me the courtesy of getting in the goddamned truck.”

Raylan got in the truck. He pulled the door shut slowly so it closed without slamming and didn’t insinuate that only a man bent on suicide would let Boyd drive.

“You hungry?” he asked politely. “We could go to Rella’s.”

“You’re buying,” Boyd insisted, starting the truck. Raylan waited for him to continue, but apparently a night in the mines could make even Boyd Crowder speak in a straight line.

“Fine.” Raylan agreed, because hadn’t that been obvious when he _asked_? “You had best call in your favors now, before that bitch wrings me dry.”

Boyd had his right arm propped along the seatback, steering them out of the rutted lot with a loose hand, slumped low in the seat like gravity was dragging him down. They lurched over a bump and Boyd’s scuffed hardhat jounced off the seat and into Raylan’s knee.

“Is Jimmie Louise _blackmailing_ you?” Boyd asked abruptly, after they’d pulled onto the paved road and made it at least a mile from the mine, as though he’d just then sussed out what Raylan had said five minutes before. He pulled his left hand off the wheel to scrub over his face — steering with his _knee_ around a blind curve, Jesus fucking Christ — and Raylan resisted the urge to shove Boyd into the passenger’s seat and drive the damn idiot home to bed.

“Smart as a whip crack, ain’t you?” Raylan said wryly, clinging onto the door for dear life.

“But – but how?” Boyd turned to stare incredulously at Raylan, coal dust on his face and the whites of his eyes shot through with red. “You do something embarrassing, son? Because you sure as shit didn’t do nothing illegal, not without me there.”

That could’ve gone without saying — Raylan didn’t do much of _anything_ without Boyd, though he could see how other folks wouldn’t realize that, since between kin and baseball and work and _expectations_ that a Crowder and a Givens ought not to be friends, Raylan sometimes didn’t see Boyd for weeks at a time.

“’Course not,” Raylan huffed, because Boyd was growling low in his throat, like he’d been warning Raylan instead of stating the obvious. Boyd must have been exhausted. He’d never let his instincts get so out of control otherwise, alpha rising to the surface from wherever Boyd normally kept it pinned. Raylan should just tell him. He pulled off his battered cap, twisted it in his hands, but Boyd kept going before he could explain.

“And besides, her brother cooks up all sorts of shit in that trailer, so it ain’t like she can cast the first stone.” Boyd paused to inhale and turned left without slowing down, stamping his foot onto the brake and cutting the engine inches from Rella’s cafe. “I mean, hell, I know she’s been up your ass for months about a second date, but dumping a girl is hardly a criminal offense, and –”

“She’s pregnant,” Raylan said, spilling out the words he’d been holding back for hours, determined not to tell a soul. Desperate to tell Boyd.

Boyd whipped his head around like someone had caught him in the jaw, eyes wide and mouth open to catch flies. “Raylan,” he breathed, his face a mirror for the shock and horror and misery roiling in Raylan’s gut.

Raylan couldn’t stand watching that. Not on Boyd’s face. “C’mon,” he muttered, pulling open the door and sliding out of the truck. “Let’s go get something to eat.”

“Raylan!” Boyd hissed, but Raylan ducked his head and pretended not to hear, clattered through Rella’s door without waiting for Boyd to follow him inside.

“Why, if it ain’t Raylan Givens,” Rella announced, leaning out from the kitchen and waving her spatula at him like she planned to step out and swat his behind. “Child, I ain’t seen you in a dog’s age. Where’s your friend?”

“Right here, Miz Rella.” Boyd sloped up to the counter like nothing was wrong, smiling at Rella with bright eyes and an innocent grin while all the acid in Raylan’s stomach churned up his throat. “And starving! It’s hungry work I’ve been doing, and make no mistake.”

Rella shook her head, but she was grinning around her missing teeth, because no one in the county could scowl under the full force of Boyd’s charm. “I heard you’d started down in the mines, Boyd Crowder,” she declared, folding her arms across her expansive bosom. “You been driving there every day and ain’t stopped by for supper yet?”

“Now, Miz Rella,” Boyd said sweetly, propping his elbows on the counter with a pup’s guileless charm. “You know I’m working nights with your boy Reed. If I stopped here for supper, I would still be devouring my third helping of your _irresistible_ buttermilk biscuits when they were calling roll at the mine.”

“You got a forked tongue, child.” Rella swatted her spatula in Boyd's direction, chuckling. “And make no mistake. Now you boys gonna set your flea-bitten selves down, or did you want to block my doorway while you eat?”

Raylan swung his leg over the stool in front of him, exhaling in relief. There were three other miners at the counter, Rella’s niece chewing gum and waiting tables on the other side. It was far too loud to talk, and Rella would keep Boyd occupied so he didn’t stop smiling, keep him from turning that awful expression back on Raylan –

A fist wrapped around Raylan’s shirt collar and hauled him back onto his feet.

“If you don’t mind,” Boyd told Rella, hand still twisted around Raylan’s shirt, “Raylan and I might go find ourselves some seats.” Rella raised her eyebrow, and Boyd shrugged, rubbing at the base of his spine with his free hand. “My back hurts something fierce, after a shift in those tunnels, and I could sure use one of those comfortable chairs at your corner table.”

“Your back aches like my balls hurt, son,” Rella replied, and even Raylan was surprised enough to laugh, despite feeling like he might puke given half a chance.

Boyd gaped, and the sight of him speechless made Rella laugh so hard her belly shook. “Renita,” she called, gesturing at her niece. “You take these scamps over to that table and bring them some coffee, then leave them alone so that one don’t tempt you into his schemes.”

“Well, now,” Boyd protested, fluttering his eyelashes like a virgin omega girl, “I wouldn’t –”

“Oh, yes, you would. Now go on, scram. I gots to put a whole new rasher of bacon on the grill, if I’m gonna put some meat on your scrawny bones.”

The twenty steps to their table took longer than a march up the gallows steps, Raylan’s feet encased in cement, yet moving far too quick. Renita cracked her gum and splashed coffee into their mugs, then sashayed away and left only Raylan, the silence buffeting his ears, and Boyd.

Raylan lifted his mug to his lips for a fortifying gulp of caffeine.

That turned out to be an error in judgment, the coffee hitting his stomach and bouncing right back out the way it came.

“I got to –” he managed, then bolted for the restroom, skidding through the door and heaving into the sink, brown coffee and yellow bile, strings of saliva hanging from his lips. He hadn’t eaten since last night, but it didn’t stop his stomach from trying to jump through his throat, spit and acid burning in his mouth.

Boyd came through the door a minute later, a glass of water in one hand and a clean dishrag in the other. Raylan couldn’t stop heaving long enough to lift his head, tears streaming from his eyes, stomach cramping, straining to shove his insides out his mouth.

“Shit, son,” Boyd said, sympathetic. He set the water glass on the edge of the sink and reached around Raylan to turn the faucet on, soaking the rag and washing Raylan’s vomit down the drain.

He wiped the cool dishcloth over Raylan’s sweaty forehead, wiped the tears off his cheeks and the threads of saliva off his lips and chin. Then he rinsed the rag and draped it over the back of Raylan’s neck, gentle as Raylan’s mama when he was six years old and sick with the flu.

“You’re all right,” Boyd hummed, resting his hand firmly between Raylan’s shoulder blades. “You’re all right.”

“You clearly ain’t old enough for coffee,” he added, and Raylan lifted his head to catch a glimpse of Boyd’s teasing smile in the mirror, the edges of it weighed down by the concern in Boyd’s brown eyes. “But don’t worry, I told Renita she’d best fetch you some chocolate milk.”

Trying to elbow Boyd in the ribs distracted Raylan from the sour taste in his mouth long enough for his stomach to settle. He straightened up, took the glass Boyd handed him and rinsed his mouth before drinking the rest of it in small sips so as not to start the miserable cycle all over again.

“You ready to go sit back down?” Boyd asked solicitously, once Raylan had splashed water on his face and into his open mouth, dried off with the damp rag.

Raylan kept his head lowered. He didn’t want Boyd delicate and gentle, big doe eyes aimed worriedly at Raylan.

Of course, Boyd followed up his compassionate query with a raspberry right into Raylan’s ear, because Boyd knew Raylan too goddamn well.

“You promised me breakfast, you jackass, and don’t think the smell of your puke is sufficient to put me off my food.”

“Get out of my way, then,” Raylan rasped, throat raw, and Boyd rolled his eyes.

Renita and Rella ogled them unabashedly from behind the counter as Raylan stumbled out of the bathroom, but Boyd shoved him forward and chivvied them to their seats before Raylan could do more than blush. His spilled coffee had been cleared away, and someone had replaced it with a large glass of chocolate milk and a straw.

“You order me the chocolate-chip pancakes, too?” Raylan asked snippily, and didn’t admit that the milk felt like heaven coating his throat, though his relieved moan likely gave it away.

“With the cherry and whipped cream,” Boyd affirmed, tipping his mug to his mouth and draining it in one gulp without adding cream and too much sugar like he normally did. Renita hurried to refill it — Boyd must have won her over while Raylan was vomiting his organs into the sink.

Boyd spun the cup between his palms and waited until they were alone again to speak, all traces of the smile he’d offered Renita drained from his face.

“What’s happened, Raylan? What’s going on?”

His shin knocked into Raylan’s, their legs tangled up under the table, kicking ankles and ramming knees into thighs, how they’d sat since they had sprouted up freshman year.

Raylan shrugged, and shredded his napkin between his fingers to keep them from shaking.

“Okay,” Boyd sighed. “Let’s start easy. Jimmie Louise came to see you, I suppose.”

“Last night.” Raylan nodded. “Had her brother drive her straight to my front door.” He looked out the window, watched the mist twist through the trees at the edge of the parking lot.

Boyd’s breath hissed between his teeth. “Was your mama home?” He sounded as worried as Raylan had been, Jimmie Louise shouting in the front yard like she might wake all his ancestors from the dead.

“I think Jimmie was hoping she would be,” Raylan said, cutting a glance at Boyd, who nodded his agreement. Jimmie Louise wasn’t smart, but she was cunning like Bowman could be, happy to play dirty if it guaranteed a win. “But she and Aunt Helen are up in the hills all week, visiting kin.”

“Wouldn’t have done the bitch any favors,” Boyd said, voice low, undercut with an alpha snarl Raylan had never heard from his friend. “Your mama would have smacked her clear across the county.” Boyd frowned, perhaps regretting that Raylan’s mama hadn’t been home after all. “She get out of the car?”

“Tried to invite herself in.” Raylan’s shoulders tensed as he remembered standing at the screen door, feeling like he was thirteen years old again while his mama tried to keep the mining company’s shitkickers from raiding the house for his Uncle Silas. “Had her brother right behind her.” The glass of milk rattled against the table, grasped tight in Raylan’s fist.

“And then what happened?” Boyd wondered, leaning in.

“Breakfast!” Renita trilled, and they both jumped. “Aunt Rella says you ain’t to leave nothing on your plates,” she informed them, unloading platter after platter as the table groaned under the load of bacon and sausage, gravy and steak and pancakes and hominy. “She says she’s sending you home with a pie for your mama, Raylan, since Frances ain’t been by the holler in months.”

“Tell her to hold off on congratulating my mama,” Raylan answered coolly. “Arlo ain’t dead, he’s just spending a few months inside. I’m sure she’ll be back up to Nobles soon as he’s home.”

Renita shook her head, jingling the array of hoops dangling from all the holes in her ears. “All the more reason to celebrate now,” the girl replied, then picked up her empty tray and sauntered back to the counter, hips swinging, cracking her gum.

“That girl’s gonna be more trouble than a hurricane,” Boyd declared through a mouthful of biscuit, gravy smeared across his chin. Then he swallowed, throat bulging around the biscuit like a snake’s, and hunkered back down to the topic at hand.

“You were saying?” he prompted, and Raylan replied by cramming two pieces of bacon in his mouth. “After she tried to holler down your mama and bust in your door?”

Raylan lifted a shoulder, pressed his leg to Boyd’s because there wasn’t any room under the table, and not because he needed comfort from a Crowder boy.

“Said she was pregnant.” It wasn’t precisely what she’d said, more a summary of Jimmie Louise’s grating voice and her shrill accusations and the tears she’d been crying all summer trying to seduce Raylan back up to the ridge. “Said it belonged to me.”

“And what did you do?” Boyd asked, shifting the plates like chess pieces until there was a blackberry pancake cut into bite-sized pieces sitting in front of Raylan. Raylan glared at Boyd, who glared back, unrepentant, until Raylan surrendered and took a bite. Then another. Boyd Crowder might be an insufferable asshole, but Rella’s blackberry pancakes were worth more than Raylan’s pride.

“Slammed the door,” Raylan told him, reaching for the syrup. “Threatened them with the shotgun till her brother dragged her away. Then I went for a drive.” Pieces of pancake were awash in maple syrup, Raylan’s own reenactment of the Egyptians drowning in the Red Sea. He scooped some whipped cream into the middle, for sea foam.

“Raylan.”

Raylan hated his name when Boyd said it like that, the fine wool of a swaddling blanket, the brush of his mama’s fingertips through his hair as she sung a lullaby. He stabbed his fork through a blackberry and hunched his shoulders, hating that Boyd could gaze right through him, uncover everything Raylan hoped to hide.

“Raylan, how long were you waiting for me at the mines?”

Raylan flicked a piece of hominy at Boyd’s oversized head. “Does it matter?” he asked, and his voice didn’t rise; he wasn’t begging for Boyd to let it lie, wouldn’t confess to standing by the mineshaft through the night, promising himself that it would all be settled once he could talk to Boyd. “Jimmie Louise is _pregnant_. What the hell am I gonna do?”

“Shit.” Boyd ran a hand through his hair and tugged, a habit Aunt Helen swore would leave him bald. “You sure she was telling the truth? Girl’s been panting after you for a while. She might be lying.”

Raylan lifted both hands, palms to the sky. “Do I look like a doctor?” he snapped. “I don’t know. She looked pregnant, if that’s what you mean. Smelled funny, too.”

“Smelled funny?” Boyd repeated, wrinkling his forehead. “Christ, your nose is worse than useless, Raylan. Do you mean to say she smelled pregnant or that she smelled like she’d been rolling around in pig shit?”

“What do you think? I’m here, ain’t I, waiting on your feckless ass at the mines and puking in the sink?”

“Okay,” Boyd placated, taking a deep breath. “You’re right.”

He exhaled loudly through his mouth, staring at the table with an expression that took Raylan back five years to Clary Crowder’s funeral, Boyd hiding his thin face when it crumpled with grief.

“You could mate her?” he suggested, though he sounded like he’d rather gargle broken glass than watch Raylan mate Jimmie Louise.

“I’m not mating anybody,” Raylan swore, teeth bared and fingers white around his butter knife. “Not ever. I’m not letting anyone wrap their drooling maw around my throat and leave me chained.”

Boyd cocked his head and frowned, bemused by what, Raylan’s defiance? Boyd should know better than to believe that Raylan would roll over and show his belly like a toothless bitch.

“Raylan,” Boyd said cautiously, still frowning. “You’d be claiming _her_. Ain’t nobody expecting Jimmie Louise’s omega tooth marks on your skin.”

Oh. Right. Raylan hid his blush in his milk. Of course, Raylan would be the dominant mate. Boyd thought he was a beta. Hewas near enough, long as he stayed on the sups.

“Doesn’t matter,” Raylan grunted, biting into a sausage link. “If I claimed her, she’d want a house. And a house means bills, and bills mean dropping out of school and going to work in the mines, drinking down at the puddle till I’m drunk enough to go home and pretend I ain’t gonna die less than a mile from where I was born.”

The future Raylan painted stretched out between them, thick with coal dust and the relentless rhythm of a pick on stone, the rust of broken-down cars in the yard, a nagging woman and moldering dreams.

“I’m not gonna claim a mate,” Raylan insisted. “Not now, not ever. And nobody’s claiming me.”

“I know,” Boyd agreed, finger painting with his gravy and sounding inexplicably sad. Was he hoping Raylan would mate Jimmie and become the no-account white trash everyone expected from the Givens line, a dirty undershirt and a beer gut and pot growing in the yard?

“I wouldn’t have let you mate her anyhow,” he added, as though Boyd had any control over what Raylan did or did not choose to do.

He must have sensed Raylan’s contrary scowl, because he lifted his head and offered a conciliatory grin. “Oh, calm yourself. You can’t mate Jimmie Louise because I cannot stand that cunt,” he said bluntly, pulling a toothpick out of the dispenser next to the salt. “And if you ever did set up house, it had better be with a woman who can cook, since I expect to be invited for dinner near about every night.”

“Go find your own mate,” Raylan told him, and for some reason that knocked the smile right off Boyd’s face. Good lord, but Boyd was baffling after a night in the mines, moody as an omega before her heat.

“Boyd,” Raylan whispered, poking his finger through a biscuit till it looked shot full of holes. “Boyd.” He wasn’t sure how to begin, how to ask Boyd for help without giving everything away. “I think maybe it couldn't be – well, what if it ain’t mine?”

Boyd narrowed his eyes, like he could see past Raylan’s racing heart to nights on the ridge. Raylan always tucked his used condoms away before anyone could see that there was only a little clear fluid at the tip. He still didn’t know if that was because of the suppressants or his biology, only knew that it wasn’t normal for alphas, Boyd tying off condoms heavy with semen and chucking them at Raylan’s head, laughing when Raylan dodged them and cursed. He always pulled his underwear back up before somebody realized it wasn’t just sweat pooling in the crack of his ass. Could a male omega impregnate a girl? In Health class, Coach Morgan had told them that it was unnatural for omegas to lay with each other - female omegas, he meant, no male omegas anywhere except on heathen TV - but he hadn’t said if they could have kids, only that God would smite them for their sins.

Raylan sure as hell felt smote by Jimmie Louise.

“You know betas can have kids.” Boyd articulated each word, slow as molasses and squinting at Raylan. “And the condom ain’t a guarantee.”

“I know that,” Raylan said, miffed. “But how many betas do you know that _accidentally_ knocked up a girl?”

Boyd stopped squinting, no doubt too busy counting beta whelps in his head to be suspicious of Raylan.

Raylan exhaled, shoulders slumping as his heartbeat evened out. Boyd was a bull terrier once he caught a trace, and the last thing Raylan wanted was Boyd sniffing out the only secret he had left. And it made Raylan’s chest ache a little, knowing it never occurred to Boyd that he could force Raylan to spill his secrets if he just dropped his teeth and gave the command; it made Raylan smile affectionately at his distracted friend.

“None of them,” Boyd declared definitively, after a few minutes had passed and Raylan had stolen the last of the bacon off Boyd’s plate. “’Course, not that many betas can score an omega the way you can, Raylan, but you’re right nevertheless. C’mon,” he demanded, grabbing a sausage link and wrapping it in a pancake, shoved half of it in his mouth. “Let’s go.”

“Go where?” Raylan wondered, dazed by Boyd’s sudden flurry of movement. Renita hurried to their table with the check and a pie, just like she’d said, and Raylan forked over yesterday’s earnings with a polite smile, jogging to catch up to Boyd before he drove away. “Boyd, where are we going?”

“To see Jimmie Louise,” Boyd said shortly, as though Raylan ought to have known.

Raylan tried to climb back out of the truck.

Boyd forestalled this move — had apparently been anticipating it, because he could read Raylan's goddamned mind — by hopping backwards in reverse, then wheeling out of the parking lot so fast that dust devils were left spinning in their wake. Raylan clutched the dashboard and cursed Bo Crowder for giving his son a truck.

“ _Why_ are we going to see Jimmie Louise?” Raylan demanded, once the sorry highlights of his life had stopped flashing before his eyes.

Boyd cleared the next rise with all four wheels in the air. Raylan threatened to puke all over his feet. He must have been pale enough to be convincing, since Boyd slowed down to a more humane speed and kept the tires on the ground.

“Because she’s threatening you,” Boyd told him calmly, keeping his eyes on the road. “And we’re going to find out if she’s telling the truth.” He was all frenetic energy and sharp edges again, no sign of the exhausted boy Raylan had picked up an hour ago from the mine.

 _How?_ Raylan could have asked, but his heart had been hammering all night, pacing outside the mines and waiting for Boyd. And now Boyd was right there, smelling like rock and fire damp and bacon grease, and Raylan found himself tumbling quickly into sleep.

 

He woke up when they hit the last stretch of road up the mountain, Jimmie Louise’s family right down near the southern end of the county and practically in Tennessee. Raylan dug his knuckles into his eyes and blinked over at Boyd.

“You got a plan?” He yawned, head tilted back over the edge of the seat and resting on Boyd’s hand. Raylan sat up and Boyd pulled his arm in, shaking out his hand where it must have gone numb — served Boyd right, for leaving it under Raylan’s head.

“Yeah,” Boyd answered, curling his lips over his teeth in a sneer that made Raylan’s hackles rise. “I’ve got a plan.”

“You’re just a bundle of cheer right now, ain’t you?” Raylan groused, pulling his cap down over the hair flattened against his skull.

“I am,” Boyd agreed with a surprising amount of sincerity. “I have been wanting to shove Jimmie Louise down a mineshaft ever since she started whining about a second date.” And really, she should have known better. The whole school knew that even if Boyd and Raylan took the same girls out more than once, there would never be a third date.

“We’re here,” he added, as if Raylan couldn’t see the loose window screens and the blue tarps plastered over the trailer at the end of the drive.

“I’m still not really clear on the plan,” Raylan said, but Boyd was already slamming the door and striding through the yard, walking around two old cars and vaulting over a sofa rotting just beyond the porch steps.

Raylan exhaled loudly through his nose. “Knothead,” he muttered, though he climbed out of the truck and followed Boyd’s winding path through the yard. “Nobody asked for your –”

Then Jimmie Louise opened the screen door, Boyd _snarled_ , and Raylan broke into a run.

“Shit!” Raylan panted, grabbing Boyd’s elbow and failing to haul him away from Jimmie Louise, who was screaming bloody murder and trying to wrench free from the hands Boyd had clamped around her upper arms, fingers digging divots into her rosy skin. “Boyd, what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“Getting some answers,” Boyd growled, sounding like he had a mouth full of marbles. Raylan paused in his efforts to peel Boyd’s fingers off Jimmie Louise to frown at Boyd.

He found himself facing an alpha, Boyd’s canines sharpened to points, the whites blown out of his eyes.

In all the years Raylan had known him — through dynamite and brawls, the time Principal Webb slapped Boyd across the face in eighth grade, the time Josie Allen accused Boyd of only fucking girls who looked like his dead mother — Boyd had never dropped his teeth for more than a second or two. He had better control over his instincts than alphas twice his age. Raylan’s mama was always praising him, said Boyd put all his alpha into his swagger with a little left over for his smile.

“Get the hell away from my sister!”

Jimmie Louise’s brother, Bobby, came barreling up from the back of the house, shouting to be heard over Jimmie’s wailing. Bobby’s face was obscured by the sawed-off shotgun in his hands, fat sausage finger on the trigger. Boyd didn’t seem to notice the other man was there, all of his attention focused on screeching, struggling Jimmie Louise.

“Let’s not be hasty here.” Raylan held up both hands, would have taken a step away from Bobby, only that would have been a step away from Boyd. “You shoot now and you’re liable to hit your sister,” he warned, trying to keep Bobby’s attention on him. “Your _pregnant_ sister.”

If he put down the gun, Raylan could take him. He could feel it throbbing through his knuckles, the opportunity to transform his sleepless fretting about Jimmie's pup and his future into something solid, into something he could hit. Of course, first he’d have to make sure Boyd didn’t get himself shot.

“Is she?” Boyd asked, in that muffled, gravelly voice that sounded nothing like Raylan’s friend. The alpha voice that raised the hair on the nape of Raylan’s neck and sent something shivering down his spine. “Are you?” he asked again, aiming his feral glare at Jimmie’s puce face. “Are you pregnant?”

Raylan rubbed his wrist, thinking of Boyd’s fingers there a few months before, of the command in Boyd’s voice and Raylan’s inability to step away. This must have been Boyd’s plan, he realized, only maybe without the shotgun pointed at his chest.

“Yes!” Jimmie Louise sobbed, and Raylan’s hopes dropped like a stone.

But Boyd didn’t look convinced. “I can smell that,” he said, sticking his nose and deadly sharp teeth in the crook of her neck. Jimmie squealed with fear. _Stay right there_ , Raylan thought. _Bobby can’t shoot you if you stay there_. “But the thing is, Jimmie Louise, you don’t smell a damn thing like Raylan. Did you really think no one would notice that, you lying bitch? Thought you could pass this off as his pup?”

“She’s supposed to smell like me?” Raylan was startled into asking, must have sounded so astonished that Boyd looked at him and started laughing, his incisors retracting as his anger melted away.

“Oh, Raylan, you and that wretched beta nose.” Boyd smiled at Raylan, and Jimmie Louise took advantage of that distraction to worm out of his grip and back toward her brother and his gun.

Raylan smiled back at Boyd — couldn’t not, even when Boyd’s teeth were too sharp and his irises were still blown wide.

“She is indeed supposed to smell like you. And she don’t.”

“Betas don’t smell,” Jimmie Louise whined, rubbing at her upper arms where they were sure to bruise. “You can’t know that it ain’t Raylan’s.”

Boyd shook his head, smirked pityingly at Jimmie’s pink, outraged face. “He don’t smell to you, I guess. That’s your loss. But that pup ain’t his.”

Raylan _didn’t_ smell, though. If he did, everyone would know about the status he worked so hard to hide. The sups were supposed to – _Shit._ The sups he had forgotten to take that morning, too busy pacing circles outside the mine, his whole body tuned to the moment Boyd would come loping through the door.

It was okay, he told himself, trying to calm the panic whirling through his head. If it had been noticeable, Jimmie Louise would have caught it; she would have said. But that didn’t mean Boyd hadn’t smelled _something_. Boyd, who had logged Raylan’s every nuance somewhere in his oversized brain.

“And if you tell anyone that it's his,” Boyd warned her, looming to twice his unprepossessing size and shutting Jimmie’s mouth on whatever protest she had planned. “You try to drag Raylan into your shit, and I will wrap my hand around your unclaimed neck and force the truth out of you in front of the whole goddamned town. You understand me, Jimmie Louise?”

She stuck out her lip and wouldn’t look at them, but it was easy to see that Boyd wasn’t lying about what he would do, if she tried to pass off the pup as Raylan’s.

“I think you’re done here,” Bobby told them firmly, and Raylan agreed. _It wasn’t his baby._ He felt like he could float clear away, a hot air balloon marking triangles across the whole breadth of the Kentucky hills.

“I certainly hope we are,” Boyd replied, tipping an imaginary hat and putting a hand on Raylan’s shoulder, the only thing keeping Raylan’s feet on the ground. “You folks have a nice day.”

They were most of the way back to Boyd’s truck before Jimmie Louise came out onto the porch, anger boiling out of her ears. “You’re a pair of freaks!” she shouted. “Everybody knows you’re no alpha, Boyd Crowder! You’re nothing more than Raylan’s bitch, panting after his dick!”

Raylan started to turn around, willing to hit a girl for the first time in his life. Boyd’s hand gripped his shoulder a little tighter, his alpha claim to dominance clearly riding just under his skin. “You’re jealous,” she continued, as Boyd pushed Raylan the last few feet toward the truck. “Wish you’d been born with a cunt, I bet, so you could give him pups like the bitch you’re desperate to be!”

Boyd flinched, fingers tightening imperceptibly on Raylan’s shoulder, and that was all Raylan could take.

“That bitch,” Raylan hissed, spinning on his heels and ready to knock Jimmie Louise off the porch, pregnant or not.

“Get in the truck,” Boyd demanded, but there was no alpha command behind it, only a pair of tired brown eyes and a fresh cut on Boyd’s bottom lip from the incisors he’d sharpened for Raylan. “Please,” Boyd said, and Raylan uncurled his fists.

“I’m driving,” he compromised, and shoved Boyd into the truck.

 

“Were you bullshitting her?” Raylan wondered, after he’d steered them down the mountain and out of Nary Holler, headed through Harlan proper and up to his house for the tool box to fix the door of his truck, and to swallow a handful of the suppressants hidden under his bed.

“When I threatened to force a confession in the town square?” Boyd asked, arching his eyebrows at Raylan from his boneless slouch against the car door. “Do you think I was?”

Knee propped up against the dashboard, cheek creased from where he had dozed off against the seat, Boyd didn’t look anything like the alpha that had sworn to wrap his hands around Jimmie Louise’s throat and force her to her knees.

“I know you weren’t,” Raylan told him candidly, glancing over to catch Boyd’s pleased smile. “But that wasn’t what I meant. You told her I have a scent,” he clarified. “But I don’t, do I?” he asked, hoping his desperation couldn’t be read in his tone. “Betas don’t.”

Boyd shrugged, dropping his head back onto the top of the seat. “Maybe they do,” he said, “and no alpha stays close enough to tell. Maybe they don’t –” Raylan held his breath. Had Boyd figured it out? “- and it’s just your natural BO.”

“Can’t be worse than yours,” Raylan retorted, two bullets dodged in one day, and it wasn’t even noon.

“What do you think I smell like, then?” he asked, kicking himself before the words left his mouth. Did he _want_ Boyd to keep sniffing around him until he figured it out? _Jesus_. One more year, Raylan reminded himself, and he would be gone with no one the wiser. It wasn’t as if anyone else would ever come as close to Raylan as Boyd.

“Like snips and snails and puppy dog tails,” Boyd sang, grinning when Raylan turned to glower at his smug face. Then he paused, eyes going distant like they always did when Boyd was thinking, mouth slightly open to taste the air around Raylan.

“Like your glove,” Boyd finally said, one of those tourists swirling the bourbon in their glass and raving over the oak and ambergris. “A slice of your mama’s cherry pie, or a shot of Pappy Van Winkle. Least that’s how you smell today.”

“Well, ain’t you a romantic.” Raylan snorted, didn’t think twice about his words until Boyd went unnaturally still, face pressed to the leather of the seat.

It was only then that Raylan remembered Boyd’s hand on his shoulder, the way Boyd had flinched at Jimmie Louise’s idiotic taunts. He hadn’t looked surprised to hear them, though. Looked like maybe he’d heard that shit before, and how was that possible if Raylan had never heard a thing?

“Boyd –” Raylan started, then stopped. Then started again. “Boyd, you know nobody thinks –”

“Of course they do,” Boyd interrupted with a grim smile. “Bowman’s been saying it for years, now, and I know you got benched last year fighting with Dickie over me.”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” Raylan grumbled, but it was true he’d broken Dickie Bennett’s jaw at second base, Boyd whooping from the stands and Dickie stupid enough to say “Next time, Givens, leave your alpha bitch at home.” “Bowman’s an idiot, even your daddy thinks so. And I got plenty of reasons to smash in a Bennett’s face.”

“I am certain that is the case,” Boyd said agreeably, “though I would thank you to keep your estimations of my brother’s intelligence to yourself.”

Raylan rolled his eyes. That estimation of Bowman’s intelligence had been downright kind.

“Anyway, it don’t bother me none.” Boyd shrugged one shoulder, insouciant, focused on digging coal dust out from under his nails. “One day, when you’re playing in the World Series, Bowman and Dickie and the rest will be crowing all over town that _they_ were your bitch.”

Raylan threw his head back and laughed, imagined Bowman waving around a glass of whiskey and toasting his “ _friend_ , Raylan,” Jimmie Louise telling folks that Raylan Givens had once stuck his dick up her cunt, Dickie claiming that he was Raylan’s true mate.

By the time he’d gotten his laughter under control they were home and Boyd was sound asleep, the smile still soft on his face. Raylan parked in the shade to keep Boyd out of the heat, might have brushed his fingers along the coal dust worked into Boyd’s jeans, watched his smile for a moment before he crept out of the truck — out of the window, because Boyd’s doors creaked open with a banshee screech – and let Boyd sleep.


	4. Chapter 4

“C’mon,” Boyd pleaded, kicking Raylan’s ankle while Raylan attempted to dig _Heart of Darkness_ out of the mess of his locker, old tests and what might have been the remains of last week’s lunch toppling out onto the floor. “I was bored out of my goddamn mind last week. I'd let you run the books, for tonight's game.”

“No,” Raylan said — again — and bent to scoop all the trash back into his locker. He’d clean it out that afternoon. Or next Monday, maybe, before practice. Coach had started them practicing early, determined to win state come spring, and that suited Raylan just fine. The more he practiced, the easier it would be to impress the scouts.

“But Ray _lan_ ,” Boyd whined, flopping against the bank of lockers. “I cannot possibly endure another stultifying evening of first downs!”

“It’s your own damn fault,” Raylan pointed out, unapologetic, walking away from Boyd’s theatrics so that at least one of them would arrive at English class on time. “You’re the reason that Bowman made the team. Can’t you just watch the cheerleaders, like Johnny does?”

“The cheerleaders ain’t that cute,” Boyd mumbled, and Raylan refrained from saying that they’d both slept with more than half the cheerleading team. Hell, they were taking Mary Belle and Doris out Saturday night. “If you came, we could throw cherry bombs in the team’s bathrooms during half time!”

That was tempting, but Coach would kill Raylan for getting suspended senior year. “You really want me to come?” Raylan asked, and Boyd perked up, no doubt sensing an opportunity that wasn’t there.

“What gave it away?” Boyd replied. “Was it that I have been supplicating you _all day_?”

“And if I came,” Raylan continued evenly, navigating them both down the hall, since Boyd was facing the wrong direction, hopping backwards in his coal-mining boots and pouting at Raylan. “Where would I sit?”

There was a pause. Apparently, Boyd hadn’t schemed his way out of that problem just yet.

“Would I sit with you? And you’ll be sitting next to Johnny and Merle, of course, and don’t your daddy sometimes come to games?”

“You could sit somewhere else.” Boyd scuffed his boot against the dirty linoleum, glaring at the floor. Boyd hated any problem he couldn’t outsmart. “You’ve got other friends.”

Raylan laughed. “No, I don’t,” he said cheerfully, steering them through the open door and into the seats they’d claimed in the back. “And anyway, if I sat somewhere else, how would I save you from being so _bored_?”

“With semaphores,” Boyd suggested, waving his notebook around like a flag.

“Did you have something to share with the class, Mr. Crowder?” their English teacher boomed from the front of the room. Boyd jumped, flung the notebook away — it sailed neatly over three desks and hit Merle right between his close-set eyes — and Raylan was still laughing when the bell drowned out Merle’s indignant screech.

Raylan didn’t go to the game that night. If he drove to the dark edge of the parking lot and laid down with a few beers in the bed of his truck, there was no one else around to see. If another boy sauntered up to the truck around halftime, banged hard on the side and swung into the passenger seat like it was his right ... Well, it wasn’t like Raylan had any other friends.

 

“Let’s get out of here,” Boyd demanded, as soon as Raylan had hauled himself out of the truck bed and into the cab. “I’ll drive.”

“Like hell you will.” Raylan twisted the key in the ignition, slung an arm over the seat to look behind him as they rolled into reverse. “You think I want to end up in traction, son?”

“I think your taste in music is shit,” Boyd said honestly, shaking a cigarette out of the pack he’d lifted off Johnny earlier that night. He’d spent the afternoon carting Johnny and Merle and a few loud girls up-county to the game, and after all day with his kin it was either smoke Johnny’s cigarettes or get blind drunk. Both, if they had the means.

“Just because you like pansy-ass music don’t mean we all do.” Raylan reached out to turn on the radio. Boyd smacked his hand, then passed over the cigarette so Raylan could take a drag. “It’s metal.”

“It’s _death_ metal,” Boyd corrected. “As in, the kind of metal that makes the audience wish they were dead. I know you hate your daddy, Raylan, but you don’t have to take it out on my ears.”

Raylan stiffened, cigarette dangling from his fingers, and Boyd wondered if he’d gone too far, wondered if this was one of those things Raylan refused to hear. There wasn’t anyone more bullheaded in all of Kentucky: Boyd's friend would decide he didn’t want to know something, and then he’d put it out of his mind until he _didn’t_ know it, which made Boyd the jackass for saying it out loud.

“Your ears have taken worse,” Raylan finally replied, taking another long drag off the cigarette before offering it peaceably back to Boyd. “Liddy May spent a good hour shrieking in them last Friday around this time.”

Boyd shook his head in distaste, recollecting the end of that particular date. “I didn’t know an orgasm could be so damn irritating before that girl.” He stuck his finger in his ear, trying to rub out the echo of Liddy May’s painfully ecstatic screams. “Though I bet you the pussy Johnny and Merle found ain’t gonna be any better, since they were squealing up a storm on the ride here.”

“That why you’re ditching them now?” Raylan asked, his wry grin visible in the glow of the dashboard lights.

He spun the wheel lazily to the left, sending them east into the mountains without asking where Boyd wanted to go. _Away from other people_ was something they’d never had to say, whether it was Raylan stalking out of his house with a hand over his ribs or Boyd drowning in Crowder family obligations and struggling to breathe. _Anywhere you want, long as I can come, too_.

“Or was it Merle’s squealing you couldn’t stand?”

“I left them the keys,” Boyd defended himself, flicking ash out of the window, watching the orange tip of the cigarette flare to life. “And besides, they’re all going to some party at the lake, after. You know how much worse Merle is once he's had a few beers.”

“It’s all those frozen bananas he eats,” Raylan said seriously, then looked over at Boyd and couldn’t hold it in, both of them snorting with laughter. Every summer, Merle sat at the counter of Gilliam’s with his frozen banana on a stick, nibbling off the chocolate and too stupid to realize Raylan was chortling in the freezer while Boyd bit his tongue till it bled.

“You look like a faggot,” Johnny had told Merle, once, because Boyd’s cousin didn’t have his tact. “And how would you know what a faggot looks like, Cousin Johnny?” Boyd had asked, shutting Johnny up quick and sending Raylan into another breathless paroxysm of laughter inside the staff doors.

One day soon, the only place Boyd would see Raylan’s face would be on TV, a boy in a ball cap spitting sunflower seeds in the dugout or coming up to bat, and Raylan would no doubt look angry and constipated the way he always did during a game. But Boyd would know how his mouth hung open when he was laughing hard enough to piss his pants, how he’d grinned for days that time they’d hidden a bag of dog shit in Principal Webb’s car. How he looked with his eyes blown black, muscles corded down his neck and lips parted in a gasp, thrusting into some girl’s cunt with his gaze fixed on Boyd.

“You ever think about mating?” Raylan asked him then, cavalier, as though the question was of no more concern to him than the patch of gravel he was skidding across, maneuvering them away from the edge of the mountain with a careless flip of his wrist.

Boyd closed his eyes to clear all the carefully preserved images of Raylan from his head, on the off chance that his friend could actually read minds. “No,” he replied, sucking the cigarette down to the filter and hoping that Raylan couldn’t see his hand shake.

“Boyd?” Raylan’s tone had dropped, worried, his eyebrows pulled together in a frown. It was too dark for Raylan to study Boyd’s face, but something in his voice must have given him away. Boyd’s own daddy couldn’t tell if he was lying, these days, but Raylan always could.

Not that Boyd was lying. Not really. He’d looked at Raylan years ago and had never managed to look away, but he’d known from the first that Raylan wouldn’t bare his neck for anyone, not even if that anyone was Boyd.

Raylan was getting out of Harlan — all the kids said they were, talked big about moving to the city and driving a Benz, but it only felt like gospel truth from Raylan’s mouth. He was going somewhere no one would recognize him as white trash, hill folk, Arlo Givens’s bruised boy.

He didn't want to stay, and he didn't want a mate, especially a mate that would make him a faggot, get him kicked out of the farm league as a dirty queer. Boys didn’t mate boys, except in big cities on the TV; and Raylan had never been able to let a single insult slide, had nearly killed Isaac Marsee last month for saying that _Boyd_ took it up the ass (and Raylan hadn’t helped a goddamn bit, Boyd’s masculinity on the line and Raylan snarling with Marsee’s blood on his fists, winning what was meant to be Boyd’s fight).

So, all right, maybe Boyd had thought about mating. He’d also thought about how it must feel to be blown sky high with dynamite, charred through so only cinders fell back to earth. That didn't make it a good idea to light the fuse.

“You’ve really never thought about it?” Raylan wondered, sounding less nonchalant and more like he’d been waiting weeks to interrogate Boyd. “I mean.” Raylan pulled off his cap to scratch his head, uncomfortable. It had just occurred to him, no doubt, that he had broached the topic of _relationships_ , a subject he normally avoided like alpha girls and the plague. “Like you said, about Jimmie Louise -”

Boyd did them both a favor and put Raylan out of his stuttering misery. “You think I should knock up the poorest, trashiest omega in our year?” he proposed, smirking at Raylan’s huff. “Or would any girl do?”

“Hell.” Raylan pulled off the dirt road and into an open field, the grass flattened where they’d parked a few weeks before. “Any girl could cook better than your aunts. You'd have starved by now, if it weren't for my mama.”

“You got some stake in finding me a woman?” Boyd asked, sliding out of the cab, bending under the seat to grab hold of the blankets, chucking them into the truck bed before following them over the side.

Raylan flopped down next to Boyd on the blankets, reached behind his head for a lukewarm beer. “Got no stake at all,” he denied, trading his beer for Boyd’s fresh cigarette, embers glowing bright as he inhaled.

Boyd savored the dry taste of tobacco on his tongue while he had the chance: come spring Raylan would swear off cigarettes — all cigarettes, especially the precious few that made it to Boyd's lips, extinguished by Raylan's stifling glare — for fear that a whiff of second-hand smoke would ruin his batting stance or his swing.

“I was just curious. The seniors on the team have been talking mates.”

He squinted up at the Milky Way, ignoring Boyd completely. That was a sure sign that Raylan was hiding something, had left a few cards tucked close to his chest when he played his hand. Raylan was curious, sure enough, but curious about what?

“You want to know if I’ve got a girl?” Boyd tried. Raylan shrugged, blew out a sorry smoke ring. So, no, it wasn’t that. “Or if I’m sweet on one?” The next smoke ring shattered, drifted down toward Raylan’s twitching jaw. _Oh_. There it was.

Boyd rolled onto his stomach and smirked at Raylan’s frown. Raylan’s lips were pursed, his dark eyes shifting away from Boyd’s, then sliding back like Boyd’s face was Raylan’s magnetic north.

“Well?” Raylan snapped, when Boyd’s silence had worn him down. Boyd couldn’t help his grin, inappropriately delighted by the anger banked in Raylan’s whiskey eyes. “Are you?”

“Am I what?”

“Oh, fuck you,” Raylan spat, turning away from Boyd and sucking down half the cigarette. It took one more drag for him to cave, straightening up to get a good look at Boyd’s face. “Are you sweet on someone, you asshole?”

Boyd sighed, his spirits buoyed by Raylan’s poorly hidden displeasure, though dismayed the boy would need to ask.

“Have I appeared particularly smitten with any of our recent dates?” he prompted, his nose a hand’s width from Raylan’s, too dark to see each other if they moved any farther away.

“You were awful chatty with Marcy, last week, at the –”

“Raylan.”

“No,” Raylan admitted reluctantly, stubbing out the cigarette and chucking it into the grass. “But it could be –”

“And now, have I mentioned any girls to you?”

“’Course you haven’t, or I wouldn’t be asking.” Boyd breathed quietly and waited for comprehension to dawn, but of course Raylan would be as ornery about this as he was about all things. “Just ‘cause you didn’t tell _me_ , it don’t mean –”

“Who the hell else am I going to tell?” Boyd asked sharply, because Raylan should have been smarter than that. Should have known Boyd better than to think there could ever be anyone else, for any of it.

“... Yeah, okay.” Raylan surrendered, finally, after taking a second to conclude that Boyd’s brother and cousins weren’t the sort of folks a man would go running to with a crush.

Then he dipped his chin and turned his unsettlingly perspicacious eyes on Boyd, a gaze that could peel the muscle and sinew from Boyd’s bones. “But you keep your secrets, Boyd. Even from me.”

“Raylan,” Boyd whispered, and whatever he’d put into that word Raylan didn’t care for, flattened his mouth and looked away. “I let _Johnny_ drive my truck tonight, absenting myself from a party filled with drunk, skinny-dipping girls so that I might sit in a field with you, some warm beer, and half a pack of cigarettes.” There was a raw edge to his voice that Boyd hated, everything scraped down and too honest when he spoke to Raylan. “Do I seem as though I am aching for anyone but – anyone?”

For a moment, the only sounds were the crickets and the click in Boyd’s throat when he worked to swallow the word he’d almost said, the squeak of his sweaty thumb against the bottle of beer.

“Let’s ditch the girls tomorrow,” Raylan said suddenly, sitting up and pulling his knees close to his chest.

“You’ve been looking forward to seeing Mary Belle’s tits since they came in last year,” Boyd pointed out, frowning. “You have rhapsodized about them all week, in fact, and how they’re gonna bounce once you’ve got her sitting on your dick.”

“Yeah, well, I changed my mind.” Raylan spoke low, a stubborn set to his jaw, staring fiercely at the toes of his sneakers and not at Boyd. “She’s got a face like a horse.”

“We could trade?” Boyd offered carefully, almost certain before it came out of his mouth that it was the wrong thing to say.

“Christ, Boyd, are you that hard up for some pussy?” Raylan exploded, as if Boyd had offered to steal Raylan’s date instead of swap. But Boyd’s confusion must have been obvious, even to Raylan on a tear. Raylan slumped, the anger rolling down his shoulders and out his shaking hands. Raylan didn’t control his hell-fire temper for anyone. (Boyd had the bruises to prove it. But sometimes ... sometimes Raylan would look _at_ Boyd instead of through him, would see him standing there waiting for the blow, and unclench his fists.) “I just – I don’t want the girls there, tomorrow.”

“You want me all to yourself, darling?” Boyd grinned, preening, went to brush his cheeks with imaginary blush before catching sight of Raylan’s pinched expression. Raylan’s jaw spasmed; and if his fingers didn’t jerk where they were splayed against the blanket, well, Arlo Givens had trained Raylan never to flinch.

“Don’t flatter yourself,” Raylan muttered, but it sounded like _So what if I do?,_ and that siphoned all the air out of Boyd’s lungs, left his hands trembling in counterpoint to the weak flutter of his heart. “Let’s just – let’s take your old turkey rifle and go shoot at the ‘Welcome to Harlan’ signs off the highway. Let’s do that.”

Raylan stuttered, nervous as a boy asking the head cheerleader to prom, though Raylan had done that last week without any of the hesitation he showed Boyd now.

At that instant, Boyd would have gunned the engine and left Harlan in the dust if Raylan had asked, ditched his talented little brother and his roots and his hills for no more than an old hunting rifle and the tantalizing hint of Raylan’s smile.

“Sure, Raylan.” Boyd’s voice was hushed, the awed tones of a pup in church for the first time. “Anything you want.”

“Shouldn’t say things like that,” Raylan warned him, eyes twinkling bright as stars. “Could get you into all sorts of trouble.” He smiled — one of those small, pleased grins that no one else ever saw, no trace of mockery in it, or banked rage — and Boyd knew that Raylan had the right of it. Boyd was in all sorts of trouble.

_Anything you want._

Not because of what he’d said to Raylan, though. That wasn’t it. It was because, now that Boyd had said it, he was afraid it might be true.

* * *

Someone in Raylan’s driveway wouldn’t stop laying on their horn, ruining a perfectly beautiful Saturday that Raylan had planned to spend in bed, asleep. Until noon, preferably, or maybe later than that, replaying the highlights from the game he’d won them the night before.

“Raylan!” Frances Givens hollered up the stairs, adding to the racket. Raylan flattened his pillow over his ears. “Get your ass downstairs, before Helen shoots your boy!”

Raylan stumbled out of bed and stuck his head through his open window, shirtless in the unseasonable spring heat and squinting into the faint light of dawn, hair sticking straight up like an angry porcupine’s.

“Boyd!” he cursed, blinking blindly down at the grass. “What the fuck do you want?”

Boyd giggled, which didn’t really explain –

Wait. _Giggled_?

“Ain’t you grown up pretty, Raylan Givens!” someone who definitely wasn’t Boyd shouted, followed by an appreciative wolf whistle and a slow clap.

Raylan rubbed his eyes, the rusty blur of Boyd’s truck coming into focus, Boyd leaning out of the driver’s window with a brilliant grin and his dark hair combed flat, a bevy of shapely legs and arms and cleavage piled in the back. It looked like Boyd had raided a whorehouse. Raylan blinked, and saw Ella Jean — who’d been a year ahead of them at Evarts until she’d started working at Audrey’s — grinning up at Raylan like a cat with a full saucer of milk.

 _Had_ Boyd raided the whorehouse?

“Come _on_ ,” Boyd commanded, and not for the first time, given the way his elbow was jiggling. Boyd’s energy — “that boy’s got an energy,” Raylan’s mama always said, as though an angel’s charm and the devil’s wiles were something they could hope to cure with Ritalin — slipped from his smile to the rest of him when he got impatient, jittering knees and jiggling elbows, tip-tapping fingers and toes. “It’s near four hours to Lexington and we’re burning daylight!”

“Give me a goddamn minute!” Raylan shouted back, picking a shirt up off his floor and slinging it over his head, tugging up the jeans he’d worn yesterday, belt still threaded through the loops. He swallowed two sups dry, grabbed his cap and jammed it over his uncombed hair, and was skidding downstairs and into his jacket and shoes before he had time to wonder _why_ they were driving to Lexington — him and Boyd and a truck full of whores.

He shoved his sneakers on without bothering about the laces, kissed his mama on the cheek and darted around the shotgun Aunt Helen was waving menacingly at Boyd, standing on the front porch in her dressing gown.

There were a series of catcalls and high-pitched giggling as Raylan approached the truck. “Morning, ladies,” he muttered, face hot enough to fry an egg, and scrambled into the cab before they’d finished shrieking with laughter at his blush.

“Took you long enough,” Boyd griped, but he swung the truck out of the drive with one hand, used the other to hand Raylan an enormous styrofoam cup, lid spattered with milky coffee that Raylan could smell from across the cab.

“Oh, thank god,” Raylan told the cup, tilted it to his lips and let the coffee burn his tongue, sliding down his throat to warm muscles still aching from last night’s game. He’d emptied the cup before they pulled onto the highway, tipping his head all the way back and shaking out the last sugary dregs.

“You can buy more when we stop for gas.” Boyd sounded amused, his own coffee still half-full and propped upright between his thighs. Raylan cast it a covetous look, and Boyd responded by gulping it down before he could snatch it away. Boyd’s reflexes had gotten quicker, after the last three fishing trips where Boyd had foolishly thought he could savor his coffee, and wound up losing it to Raylan.

Of course, it had been awhile since the last fishing trip, Bo Crowder vehement that fishing was something to do with kin and not with the insolent Givens pup. And, although Boyd did usually wake him up too goddamn early to get to the Forks, they didn’t normally bring along five working girls.

“Did you kidnap Audrey’s girls?” Raylan asked, because that was the only reasonable explanation that came to mind.

Though, if Boyd had been planning a raid on the henhouse, Raylan would have expected to be brought into the scheme a little sooner, instead of having Boyd show up unannounced with the coop.

Boyd barked out a laugh and slapped the wheel. “I’ll have you know this is _work_ , son, not pleasure.” His brown eyes sparkled — a sure sign Boyd was knee deep in a successful con. “Bo says I need to pay off the truck, pull my weight in the family business.”

Raylan’s face darkened, thunder and lightning gathering on his tongue, but Boyd waved off Raylan’s lowering anger with a dismissive flick of his hand. “Shut up,” he said, as if he could hear Raylan’s inner voice insisting that Boyd had better stay the fuck away from a life of petty crime. “ _So_ , my daddy says to pull my weight, says to go collect from Audrey. Being the dutiful and devoted son that I am, I call on Miss Audrey –”

“When?” Raylan interrupted, frowning. Boyd hadn’t told him about any of this, not about Bo nor Audrey, and they’d been passing notes all week through Physics, kicking each other awake in Math.

“Tuesday,” Boyd answered breezily, like it didn’t matter that he’d had all week to tell Raylan and hadn’t said a damn word. “You and Johnny had practice. I took Merle. Would’ve taken Bowman, but you know how he bites.” He winked, riding high on the story he was spinning for Raylan, days later than it should have been told.

“Anyway, Miss Audrey says the girls could use more suppressants, and you know how difficult suppressants are to acquire in Harlan.” Raylan didn’t know — he’d never tried to buy his sups less than three hours from home, never from a pharmacy where anyone would recognize his name. “She says she’s got a friend in Lexington who will do their blood work for cheap, but she needs someone to give them a ride to the clinic upstate. And,” Boyd drawled, sweeping both hands into the air like the ringmaster at a circus, “here we are!”

Raylan tried to keep scowling, but it melted like a late snow under the summer heat of Boyd’s grin, his expansive delight in presenting Raylan with this coup. Boyd had bent under his daddy’s thumb, yet popped back holding a free trip to Lexington and a truck full of whores.

“You didn’t want to take Merle?” Raylan sniped, and Boyd’s brow furrowed before he caught sight of Raylan biting his lip to hold his smile in. “He enjoyed it the first time, didn’t he, the chance to leer at Audrey’s girls?”

Raylan was guessing, but there wasn’t much need to guess when it came to Merle, who’d no doubt been hoping that the Crowder name would usher his pimply ass into a trailer for free.

Boyd snorted. “He tried to demand a blow job as part of the collection,” he confided, torn between amusement at Merle’s antics and embarrassment at having him for kin. “Miss Audrey denied his claim, but offered him a discounted hand job with the girl of his choice.” Boyd raised his eyebrows, gave a disappointed shake of his head. “Elsie said he came before she got his zipper down.”

Raylan sputtered, clutched at his sore stomach muscles and slid sideways off the seat he was laughing so hard.

“Besides,” Boyd proclaimed over Raylan’s wheezing, “You know I would never consider trucking a brood of whores anywhere without you here to guard my back. What if they tried to jump me, Raylan? What would I do then?”

Boyd’s nonsense aside, he had woken Raylan up before dawn because they’d agreed — without words, without promises, though it felt to Raylan like a mandate graven in stone — never to take a girl out alone, and apparently that pact included driving prostitutes to their annual check-ups at six am.

Raylan had the sudden urge to touch Boyd, bubbling desperation in his fingertips, heart racing in his chest. He wanted to wrap his fingers around Boyd’s bony wrist and press his palm to the nape of Boyd’s neck, slide across the seat until he was hooked under Boyd’s arm like a girl, their fingers intertwined.

“You’re an idiot,” he muttered to himself, shoving his hands under his thighs. It must have been all the pussy in the back, a truck full of omega pheromones screwing with Raylan’s senses, throwing off his sups.

Sure, Boyd had chosen to spend all day on the road with Raylan, when he could have brought his kin or kept the girls to himself, especially since Boyd’s daddy would certainly find out and knock Boyd on his ass for “consorting with that damned Givens runt.”

And sure, nearly all Boyd’s dates occurred in the cab of Raylan’s truck, and sometimes on the ridge the moonlight would glitter in Boyd’s eyes and make it seem like Boyd was looking at _him_ , like there weren’t two girls and a sheet of glass between them. Like Boyd’s sweaty, gleaming skin could be pressed to his, fingers digging into Raylan’s hips, like Raylan could lick his lips and catch his tongue on Boyd’s sharp teeth. But that was just Raylan’s stupid omega brain, fantasizing about alpha canines and his bared throat, about Boyd’s mud-brown eyes sparkling when Raylan made him laugh.

Boyd might run Raylan down in the halls, might share his dates and show up at all his baseball games, but Boyd was an alpha — cleverer than anyone else in Harlan, graceful as a panther and sly as a fox, a _catch_ , as Raylan’s mama said — looking for a pretty omega girl, and not for a boy freak. Boyd would be disgusted by Raylan, if he knew, either by Raylan’s unnatural biology or by the fact that said biology had apparently turned Raylan queer for his best friend.

Raylan dug his fingernails into his palms, painful red crescents branded on callused skin. They would graduate, in a few months, and Boyd would find a mate — said he never gave it a thought, but Raylan could tell he was lying, though Lord knew Boyd never stayed with an omega long enough to mark a claim.

Come June, Boyd wouldn’t be chasing Raylan in the halls. They wouldn’t pass notes all through class, or blow spitballs at the teachers' backs, or spend lunch finishing each other’s assignments and getting kicked out of the library for being too loud. (Raylan did all Boyd’s science homework, shop projects, and all the math that wasn’t angles or distances, and somehow their English teachers never wondered why Raylan’s essays were in Boyd’s prickly scrawl.)

Boyd would have a mate, he would have his kin, and he wouldn’t show up in Raylan’s driveway at dawn with fishing poles or prostitutes, or ten at night with moonshine and a dangerous gleam in his eyes.

 _Doesn’t matter what Boyd does, after_ , Raylan reminded himself harshly. _Come June you’ll be batting in the farm leagues and on your way to the majors. After school ends you won’t ever see Harlan again._

“I gave you that coffee so you _wouldn’t_ fall asleep.” Boyd reached over and grabbed Raylan’s cap, used it to swat him on the head. Raylan jumped, blinking uncomprehendingly at Boyd, who snorted. “Good morning, sunshine,” he drawled, hitting Raylan a few more times until Raylan wrestled his hat out of Boyd’s hand.

“You boys gonna fight?” one of the girls shouted, tapping on the rear window and leaving lipstick smears on the glass. “Can you take your shirts off, before you do?”

Raylan blushed. Boyd hunched his shoulders, and they both tried to ignore the other shouted suggestions and the clatter of delicate knuckles on the back windshield.

“Boyd.” Raylan had to raise his voice, to be heard over the girls in the back. He waited until he had Boyd’s attention, then solemnly said: “Let’s never, ever go to Audrey’s.”

Boyd nodded, equally grave. “Perhaps we could leave them in Lexington?” he considered seriously. “Is it still human trafficking if we don’t get paid?”

“Why don’t we just turn them over to the cops?” Raylan replied sardonically, then flipped on the radio to drown out the insistent hollering from the truck bed. He skimmed through the staticky stations, dipped his chin so he could watch Boyd without the other boy knowing. Boyd’s slender fingers tapped a discordant rhythm against the wheel, his dark hair fluffing like a chick’s as it dried, muscles uncoiled in his shoulders, face calm and gaze flicking thoughtfully over the black ribbon of the road, the same boy Raylan had been looking at for years. And in a few months, everything would change.

(Maybe it didn’t have to. Some of the teams scouting Harlan weren’t based that far away, not more than a day’s drive, something Boyd could do easy once Raylan had a place. Boyd was smart enough to get work anywhere, if he was so inclined. He could even enroll at a big-city college, find one near where Raylan played. They could –)

Things _would_ change, Raylan knew. He’d been depending on that for his whole life, something new after eighteen years of the same, miserable shit. And didn’t it make Raylan look like a fool, after almost two decades waiting to leave — eighteen years, and _now_ he was soaking up the dusty smell of Boyd’s truck, the mountain shiver of Boyd’s voice as he sang “[Livin’ on a Prayer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k18G7bLrHYQ)” over the static of the radio.

Maybe it did make him a fool, but that didn’t stop Raylan from casting another avid look at Boyd’s expressive face, from grasping at the moment they were in and hanging on.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Christmas Eve, to those of you who celebrate Santa, or first night of Hanukkah. :)


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so I said once a week, but this is my very favorite chapter (I think), and I couldn't resist giving it away.

The ride to Lexington passed easy, like time with Boyd always did: Boyd driving safer than usual on account of the girls, Raylan fiddling with the radio every time a station faded out of range. They stopped five times on the way: once for gas and four times for the restroom, because apparently omega girls had very small bladders.

Ella Jean climbed into the cab just after they pulled off the interstate, a cloud of hairspray and perfume in the space between Boyd and Raylan, giving imperious directions to the girls’ clinic.

Familiar directions.

Raylan recognized that 7-11, the bail bondsman right next door with his neon sign. His stomach sank as they crested the hill and pulled into the parking lot of the South Lexington Medical Center. The omega clinic. _His_ omega clinic.

“Are you getting out,” Ella Jean inquired drily, shoving at Raylan’s shoulder, “or do you want me to climb over your lap?” She leaned closer, a sultry look in her kohl-rimmed eyes. “I could stay there a while, you know. If something came up.”

“Christ, Raylan, let the woman out!” There was no hint of alpha in Boyd’s voice, nothing but mild exasperation and an eagerness to escape Ella Jean, but it still set Raylan in motion. He climbed out of the truck, helping the girls over the side until he remembered that he needed to come up with an excuse, fast, before –

“C’mon boys, let’s go inside.”

“No!” Raylan’s objection might have been a bit vehement, since the entire parking lot turned to stare. “Uh. Why don’t Boyd and I catch a movie, and we can pick you ladies up when you’re done?”

“Aww,” Elsie cooed, dragging a blood-red fingernail down Raylan’s smooth cheek. “Look at you, afraid of the omega clinic.”

At least Boyd seemed on board with Raylan’s flight plan, despite Elsie’s teasing. Boyd probably _was_ afraid of the clinic, whereas Raylan was afraid of what familiar faces he’d find inside.

Faces like Dr. Parsons’s, who was striding across the parking lot. She wasn’t paying their gaggle of omegas any attention, though, was focused on –

“Hey, that’s my doctor. Dr. Parsons!” One of the girls threw both hands in the air, hollering the doctor’s name. “Dr. Parsons!” Dr. Parsons looked up, a polite half-smile in place as she changed course to say hello to the crazy girl flagging her down. “It’s me, Doc. Barby May.”

“Of course,” Dr. Parsons said warmly, shaking Barby’s hand. “Barby May.”

She clearly had no idea who the girl was, one of a thousand omegas she had on file: poor black girls from town, poor white girls from the hills who were nothing to her but properly dilating pupils, deep breaths into a stethoscope and healthy pink cunts.

Then she turned her head, taking in the crowd of working girls, and Raylan ducked behind Boyd a second too late. “Why, Raylan Givens,” she announced cheerfully. “We haven’t seen you here for months.”

She recognized Raylan, of course, the freak of Appalachia. They were always thrilled to see him at the clinic, probably had batteries of additional tests for the only male omega that came through their doors.

“You go here, Raylan?”

It wasn’t Boyd who asked. It was Ella Jean, arms folded and pencil-thin eyebrows arched. Boyd had turned to stare at Raylan, head cocked and nothing moving but his eyes, scanning Raylan’s face. Boyd only stopped moving when he was plotting a crime, planning a retaliation, or solving a particularly tricky math problem. It was dangerous, to come upon Boyd standing still.

“Well,” Dr. Parsons hedged, because apparently college and medical school and years at a clinic that served hillbillies had taught her that Raylan’s anomalous designation might not be something he bruited about.

“My mama does,” Raylan told them, tugging at the brim of his hat. She _had_ come up, after all, when Raylan was fourteen and burning, so it wasn’t a lie. If Raylan lied, Boyd would know, and he’d sniff circles around Raylan till he had the truth. “She sends me here for pills.”

“If I were mated to Arlo Givens I’d send you out for arsenic,” Ella Jean muttered.

“That’s so _sweet_ ,” Elsie crooned, sidling right up into Raylan’s chest, her lips at his chin. “I always say it’s the boys who are good to their mamas that make the best mates. And the best lays.” She winked saucily, and laughed when Raylan backed away from her until he hit the side of Boyd’s truck.

Boyd hadn’t quit staring at Raylan. Hadn’t twitched a single, solitary finger, standing silent and too goddamn still.

“It was lovely seeing all of you.” Dr. Parsons coughed, one foot behind her and evidently eager to escape. “Raylan, do give your mother my regards.” She nodded, then hurried away, Raylan’s secret tucked safely in her files and not splattered bloody on the pavement like he’d feared.

“We shouldn’t take more than two hours,” Ella Jean assured him and Boyd, herding the other girls toward the clinic doors. “We’ll meet you boys back here. Bring lunch!”

“French fries!”

“Chili dogs!”

After shouting their lunch orders, the girls disappeared through the sliding doors, leaving Boyd and Raylan in a busy parking lot under the morning sun. Boyd looked far too serious, but Raylan figured there was no chance he had guessed what Dr. Parsons had almost revealed — he’d have ditched Raylan by now, if he had, or maybe punched him in the jaw.

“Boyd?” Raylan shifted his weight to his other leg, feeling the strain in his thighs from running sprints in practice all week. “How do you feel about catching a movie? I bet the theater here plays those fancy foreign films you like.”

Boyd rolled his eyes. “We’re in Lexington, Kentucky, you fool, not New York. We’ll be lucky if they’re playing _Bloodsport_.” He rubbed the key between his fingers, frowning at Raylan, and despite his surety that Boyd _couldn’t_ know, panic constricted Raylan’s chest.

“Raylan?” Boyd said hesitantly, a worried crease between his brows. Raylan held his breath. “You’re not ... You’d tell me if you were sick. Wouldn’t you?”

For a split second, Raylan heard the word “sick” dripping with venomous disgust — _Jesus, Raylan, you’re a sick fuck_ — the way he was certain Boyd would say it if he knew. Then Boyd’s concern broke through, and Raylan collapsed against the side of the truck, exhaling so fast that the world spun.

He almost laughed with the rush of relief, but choked it down when he glimpsed something very like fear in Boyd’s eyes. The Crowders had spent months driving back and forth to Lexington, Raylan recalled, in and out of some fancy hospital they couldn’t afford. Then the doctors gave up or the money ran out, and Clary Crowder came home to die.

“I’m healthy as a horse, Boyd,” Raylan promised, reached out to squeeze Boyd’s shoulder in a brief, comforting grip. “I tell you about every goddamn muscle ache from practice, don’t I? You think you wouldn’t know if something was wrong?”

“I’d better,” Boyd threatened, voice strained. He shook Raylan’s hand away and vaulted over the side of the truck, stomping across the bed to get to his door. Raylan shrugged and swung back into his seat, assumed they were done.

Then Boyd’s fingers caught on Raylan’s wrist, fingertips pressed over the blue of his veins. “You’re sure?” Boyd demanded, grip tight. “You’re fine? Your mama’s fine?”

Raylan felt like they’d tumbled out of the parking lot and landed on the cut grass of a cemetery lawn, Raylan once again twelve years old and bungling every attempt to comfort a freshly motherless pup. He wondered if he could take Boyd out for gas station candy and ice cream, this time, cure the world’s ills with a sugar rush and a bellyache.

“Well, now,” Raylan said, his insouciant smile at odds with the nerves prickling under his skin, trying to soothe the tension in Boyd's piercing gaze. “I know your tricks, Boyd Crowder, and asking after my mama means asking after her cooking.” He kept his voice light, hoping to drag Boyd back from a summer funeral, flower arrangements and cemetery dirt. “You want me to invite you home to dinner, because Mama’s fine and you’re after my share of her meatloaf and pie.”

Mentioning food seemed to do the trick, just like moon pies had almost six years before. Boyd’s grip loosened and a smirk replaced the anguished twist of his lips. “Why, Raylan, I’d be happy to join your family for supper this lovely evening, how kind of you to ask.” He grinned, as if his distress was nothing more than a clever facade, a way to con his way into dinner at the Givens home.

Boyd’s moods blew through like summer storms, like a flash flood down a mountain creek. If it weren’t for the red marks on Raylan’s wrist he might have imagined the clouds that had darkened Boyd’s face moments before, the acrid, ozone smell of worry so strong that even Raylan’s weak nose could catch the scent.

“When Aunt Helen shoots you, I’m going to laugh,” Raylan replied, but Boyd had smiled and Raylan couldn’t help following suit. “Now are you taking me to the movies, or what?”

“You’re an awfully bossy date,” Boyd groused, shifting the truck into gear. “If you’re expecting popcorn and butter, you’d better put out.”

“You couldn’t handle me.”

Boyd made an obscene noise. “I could handle you just fine. It’s Ella Jean that frightens me.”

“And Elsie _don’t_?” Raylan wrinkled his nose, shuddering at the memory of her red nails digging into his cheek.

“They all do,” Boyd admitted. “But we’ve got two hours free, and no girls. Have you already chosen which movie I’m taking you to see?”

They’d wind up watching whatever Boyd wanted and Raylan knew it. Boyd had a way of proposing something, meandering around the idea until you believed that _you’d_ convinced _him_.

But knowing it didn’t stop them from arguing all the way to the theater, mountain drawls and a muddy truck, two hillbilly boys living it up in the city for a day. Raylan stuck his head out of the window, whooping through yellow lights and scaring well-dressed families out of crosswalks, Boyd crowing with delight. Raylan grinned, squeezed the moment tight, and held on.

* * *

It was the perfect day.

Boyd had known it would be; slept fitfully, restless and ready for the day to begin. He’d spent twenty minutes in the shower at four am, to pass the time. He’d forced himself to drive out to the gas station east of town to keep from waking all Audrey’s girls up before five, rousting them out of their trailers so that he could go bumping down the Givens’s drive and start the day.

Raylan’s eyes would be swollen shut with sleep, drool crusted at the corner of his mouth and scowling like an old man who’d lost his spectacles. Boyd hadn’t gotten to wake Raylan up in months — winter was too cold to sleep in the back of their trucks, and they hadn’t gone fishing since baseball season had begun — and he’d gone too long without seeing his friend’s sleep-addled face.

It went just like Boyd had known it would. (Though he hadn’t expected Helen to be awake and menacing him with the shotgun.) The day had only improved from there, Raylan’s throat working as he tipped his head back and drained his coffee, his long fingers spinning the radio dial, his grin as he rolled down the window and played air guitar.

Nothing could ruin Boyd’s day – nothing but that beta doctor knowing Raylan’s name. All the doctors at the Baptist Health Hospital had recognized Boyd, twelve years old and sitting in the hard plastic chairs of the waiting room, scuffing his shoes on the floor and waiting for them to fix his mama’s insides.

Nobody drove all the way to Lexington unless something was wrong; and if nothing was wrong then why hadn’t Raylan told Boyd about going upstate for his mama, why hadn’t he invited Boyd along?

Raylan hadn’t explained, not satisfactorily, but he had reminded Boyd that his alpha nose would have scented an illness, the gangrene odor of decay that had wafted out of Clary Crowder’s sick room and into her grave.

Raylan didn’t smell like sickness — didn’t smell like much of anything, no beta did — and so he must be running errands for his mama, like he’d said, and they could return to enjoying the perfect day.

Boyd paid for the popcorn and movie tickets. He spent an hour brushing his fingers against Raylan’s in the popcorn bucket, chuckled when Raylan handed him an extra straw to chew on so he wouldn’t ruin the one in their coke.

He wondered if Raylan didn’t comprehend that it was those sorts of familiarities — snagging an extra straw because he knew Boyd liked to chew on the ends, ordering one large soda and expecting to share — that invited their classmates’ ridicule. Or maybe he did comprehend it, but chose to pretend otherwise: if he feigned ignorance, he didn’t have to start standing farther away, or leave a seat between them in an empty theater, instead of spending two hours fighting Boyd for dominion over their shared armrest.

Boyd suspected it was the latter option of the two. Raylan wasn’t stupid, but he was stubborn, and the boy could will himself into forgetting something he didn’t want to know.

They took the girls through the drive-thru at McDonald’s, howled with laughter when they pulled around and the boy behind the window gaped at them like a goldfish, astonished by two country boys and a tangle of whores. Then they were back on the road, sun high and windows down, fingers sticky with ketchup and shiny with oil, radio cranked all the way up so the girls could sing along to “[Keep Your Hands to Yourself](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdpAop7gp0w).”

Ella Jean offered them free blow jobs after the first pit stop, gloss gleaming on her full lips. Boyd glanced at Raylan, arched his eyebrows in a question answered by the minute shake of Raylan’s head, from where he’d slouched against the truck to glare fiercely at the ground.

“We wouldn’t dream of ruining your day off,” Boyd declined, dipping his head politely. Ella Jean had shrugged and turned to Raylan, then slanted Boyd a calculating look once she understood that he’d spoken for them both.

Boyd didn’t know if Raylan had gotten his dick bit years ago or what, but he’d always refused when girls offered to suck and swallow, would rather take a hand job or nothing if he couldn’t get laid. It was probably a good thing. Ella Jean’s glossy lips sliding down Raylan’s cock — only a foot away in the cab and close enough to touch — would definitely distract Boyd into driving them all off the road.

The girls tumbled out of the truck into the parking lot of Audrey’s in one giggling pile, hollering to the men watching them from inside the bar, blowing kisses over their shoulders at Boyd and Raylan. Boyd returned the sentiment, smacking his lips and making Raylan snort out a reluctant laugh, eyes shining in the golden afternoon light.

A perfect day.

“C’mon, you knothead,” Raylan prodded, before the girls had even made it inside. “Stop ogling women you can’t afford and let’s go.” He licked his lips, far more distracting than Ella Jean’s glossy pout. “I’m starving, and if we don’t get to dinner soon there won’t be any left.”

That was a miserable lie, but it reminded Boyd that he couldn’t just keep staring at Raylan’s chapped lips. The perfect day wasn’t over yet: there was Mrs. Givens’s cooking, and then Boyd had nicked a jar of ‘shine for them to share. His daddy would take it out of Boyd’s hide when he got home, but Boyd wasn’t planning on getting home till dawn. Bo Crowder would be spitting mad anyhow, that Boyd was still passing time with Raylan, so he might as well steal the moonshine and be damned for the whole hog.

“You think she’s making meatloaf?” Boyd speculated, salivating. “Or mashed potatoes? Maybe fried chicken?” He revved the engine, swung them off the paved road too fast because it was fun to watch Raylan grab the dashboard and mumble about being too young to die. “Oh, or chicken and dumplings. I haven’t had dumplings since –”

“Boyd,” Raylan said tightly, staring hard at the end of the drive. He hadn’t let go of the dash, fingers white under the nails and ground glass in his voice.

Boyd squinted down the road to the house, searching for whatever it was that had set Raylan’s mouth in one taut line, but everything looked like it had that morning, white house and curtains in the windows, gravestones in the yard, the women’s two cars, Raylan’s old heap, and Arlo’s truck.

 _Arlo’s_ truck. The one Raylan had locked in the shed almost a year ago, after the state locked Arlo Givens in jail. And they’d all pretended that it wasn’t a minor charge, a short stay elongated by Arlo’s refusal to play nice with the other inmates; they all acted like he’d be gone forever, nothing left of him but his shirts in the closet and the unfinished carving on his grave, _Arlo Givens, 1945-_.

It wasn’t as if Raylan had stopped coming to school with bruises on his face or a hand over his ribs, after Arlo went inside. Raylan had the temper of a rabid mountain lion, and — like a wild animal — he took it as a challenge if anyone so much as looked him in the eye. Since baseball season had begun, Raylan had thrown down with Mike, the third baseman, four times, only stopping because one of them might wrench their throwing arm.

Besides, Boyd had been watching, and he was fairly certain that Arlo hadn’t raised a hand against Raylan since sophomore year, when Raylan had finally grown taller than his daddy, fire in his eyes and the muscles of a varsity athlete behind his fists. But Arlo made Raylan _small_ , stole away Boyd’s friend and left someone slow and fragile in his place.

It was that fearful beta pup — hands curled protectively over his ribs, eyes wide and darting from side to side, hoping for escape instead of _planning_ for it — sitting in Boyd’s passenger seat now, staring blankly at that goddamned truck. The alpha in Boyd wanted to rip out Arlo’s throat.

Boyd cut the wheel hard to the left. If he could swing the truck around without hitting a tree, he could gun the engine and get them out of the drive, clear out of the holler and up in the hills where no one could find them, wouldn’t have to drop Raylan at home until Monday morning, maybe Monday afternoon if he didn’t mind going to school in dirty clothes.

“I go away for a year and you start working for the Crowders?” Arlo sniggered, standing in the driveway with his arms folded. “Always turned your nose up at my hard-earned money, didn’t you, swore you’d be long gone by the time I got out. But here I am, boy, and here you are, still in Harlan and still Boyd Crowder’s bitch.”

“Let’s get out of here, Raylan,” Boyd begged, fighting to keep his canines from dropping. “We can grab dinner up in Cumberland. We can drive clear back to Lexington, if you want.”

Raylan shook his head. He wouldn’t look at Boyd. “It’ll just make him meaner, when I finally come home.”

“I could stay,” Boyd offered, a feral hiss in his head insisting that he was younger than Arlo, faster, that he could take the old alpha in a fight. Raylan did look at him then, a silent reproach that ached like a fist slamming into Boyd’s alpha teeth.

Boyd growled but relented. Raylan didn’t fight Bo Crowder — did his level best to keep Boyd away from his daddy’s booming edicts and the family business, but he didn’t use his fists — and in return Boyd wasn’t allowed to battle Arlo for Raylan.

“Pick me up on Monday morning?” Boyd compromised, Raylan already swinging the door open, one foot dangling over the ground. Raylan looked around the truck and raised an eyebrow. Boyd shrugged. “I’m lending Bowman the truck,” he explained, and wouldn’t Bowman be pleased to hear that. “I’ll need a ride.”

Raylan huffed out an almost imperceptible laugh, but his eyes brightened, and he shed that timid pup for the sardonic friend Boyd knew. “Sure, Boyd,” he agreed, rolling his eyes. Boyd knew anyone else would think Raylan hadn’t understood what he really meant. Anyone else wouldn’t see the gratitude lurking deep in Raylan’s brown eyes. “I’ll pick you up.” Then he slipped out of the truck, marching down the drive toward his smirking daddy and leaving Boyd to drive home.

“Where have you been, boy?” Bo Crowder thundered, as soon as Boyd clattered through the screen door. He was waiting in the entryway. He must have heard Boyd pull up, looming over Boyd, a few inches taller and three times as wide. “Your cousin was up at Audrey’s –”

And there was Merle, skulking behind his uncle like a scavenger waiting to pick the bones.

“– and the girls there say you were out all day with Raylan Givens. Again. Haven’t I made myself clear about that particular _friendship_ , son?”

Bo emphasized the sentiment with an open hand to his son’s face, sent Boyd reeling back into the door with his cheek stinging and tears in his eyes.

And that was it, he thought, pushing himself off the door so he could take it on his feet like a man. That was the end to a perfect day.

* * *

It got worse, after that. Boyd didn’t catch on for a while, too busy ducking his daddy as March faded into April which slid immediately into May, fast as Raylan diving headfirst into a stolen base, mud from his hat to his cleats, brown all over except for the glittering white of his victorious grin.

Bo had expected his oldest son to fall back into line, after the Lexington trip, to atone for his unsavory Givens associations by stepping up to the family business with Merle and Johnny and even sixteen-year-old Bowman, now that the football season was done. That was how Bo Crowder saw his son’s place in the world.

Boyd surveyed the landscape and saw June hurtling toward them like a freight train, saw Raylan with a bat in his hands and a cap pulled low over his eyes, swinging for the county line. Raylan Givens had been leaving Harlan since he first turned on the TV and learned that there was something beyond the hills. He’d had _June 1989_ marked in red since he’d knocked his first home run out of the park, saw it so clear that Boyd could see it, too: a lanky, flop-haired boy with a glove on his left hand and a diploma in his right, running for the future without ever looking back. If Bo thought that a few beatings could dissuade Boyd from spending every goddamned day until the last one — the one where he stood on the road and watched his best friend drive away — with Raylan, then Bo didn’t have a fucking clue as to his son’s place in the world.

So, as it stood, Boyd was sneaking in and out of his own house, bribing Bowman to bring him food, and it took him longer than it should have to observe the declining state of things, especially since he saw Raylan every single day.

In Boyd’s favor, Raylan had been getting into fights — whether or not he could win them — since kindergarten, and quite possibly before. Boyd didn’t bother to ask about the split lips or black eyes, anymore; either Raylan would rant about what an asshole the other guy was, or Boyd would learn about it from the school’s grapevine.

And if Raylan’s tongue was a little sharper these days — well, so was Boyd’s. The space between them sung with tension, with the dwindling number of hours left until June, and it kept their fuses short and their skin stretched too thin.

They’d been snapping at each other for weeks: why couldn’t Boyd, for once, _write_ with the damn pen instead of chewing it like a dog; and if Raylan was so damn worried about the pens, then mayhap he could do his own fucking English homework, _for once_.

Shelly Lynn, the alpha junior who volunteered at the library, had shushed them twice before throwing up her hands and wondering why they spent so much time together, if all they did was fight. Raylan and Boyd left off baring their teeth at each other to turn in unison on Shelly Lynn. She showed them her palms, two sets of sparking brown eyes and coiled muscles apparently sufficient cause to retreat.

“Boyd and I don’t fight,” Raylan told her, completely sincere. He frowned in bemusement at Shelly before looking over to Boyd for an explanation. Boyd shrugged, equally lost.

Shelly Lynn let out an exasperated growl, though that faded to a submissive whine when Boyd growled back. “You’ve been fighting for weeks!” she insisted. She was likely unaware that she had also tilted her head sideways, unconsciously baring her neck and surrendering to Boyd. Boyd rubbed the pad of his thumb under his upper teeth to make sure they hadn’t dropped. All the tussling with his daddy must have loosened his control, if he was waging dominance battles with high school girls. “You fight about your homework, and you fight about whether or not Boyd should wait for baseball practice to end. You fight about taking girls out, and then you fight about which girls and where to take them, even though you haven’t stopped fighting about whether or not you want them around!”

“That ain’t fighting.” Raylan dismissed Shelly Lynn with a scornful flip of his wrist, wrinkling his nose at her fool ideas. “That’s just how you’ve got to talk to Boyd, to keep him from putting on airs.”

“I put on airs?” Boyd retorted incredulously. “I ain’t the one walking around in my jacket like fucking high school royalty!” And they were off again, Shelly Lynn forgotten a few feet away.

So there was the brawling Raylan did with his fists, and there was the fighting he did with his acid tongue.

Then there were his unending inquiries into Boyd’s plans after high school. Raylan was worse than their simpering guidance counselor, Ms. Tipton, a thin beta drenched in too much perfume, twenty-two and down from Louisville to help save the poor hillbilly youth. She kept handing Boyd pamphlets for state university, sighing about his “potential” and his “stellar grades” and “don’t you want to get out of Harlan, Mr. Crowder?”

Because outsiders believed Harlan was nothing but moonshine and mistrustful poor folk with bad teeth, believed — like Raylan — that the only road to a good life was the road out of the mountains that hemmed them in.

Boyd blew her desk clear through the office door, one afternoon when she’d lingered outside to flirt with the biology teacher after lunch. Ms. Tipton resigned the same day, packed up her shiny new car — a car like that wasn’t meant for country roads, shocks that couldn’t take a bit of rough — and lit out of Harlan, headed back to the city where she belonged.

Raylan wasn’t so easy to faze.

“You’re too smart for that.” ‘That’ was working for his daddy, or it was working in the mines when Boyd suggested it, or working construction or driving a truck. Boyd threatened to become a minister, since it was about the only job in the county Raylan hadn’t rejected out of hand, and Raylan had said he wasn’t letting Boyd turn Harlan into his own personal cult. “I ain’t coming home to find pictures of you on every storefront in town, Crowder.”

“You ain’t coming home at all, Raylan.” Boyd hadn’t meant to say that. He tried not to think about it — thirty-two days till June — but it was always there, the bad taste on the back of his tongue, the tightness in his lungs, the ache in his gut.

Raylan fidgeted, like a thorn bush had sprouted suddenly under his bony ass. “You don’t have to either, you know.” He looked like a crook, shifty-eyed, gaze darting over everything in the truck cab but Boyd. “You could – Boyd, you don’t have to stay in Harlan.”

Harlan, where Boyd’s mother was buried in the churchyard. Where his grandmother was buried behind the house, facing east and waiting for the Rapture, probably as impatient with Jesus as she’d always been with her kin. Harlan, where Boyd’s daddy had taught him how to shoot and fish, where he’d taught Bowman on the same BB gun and old fishing pole.

Boyd knew every inch of Harlan’s hills. He had driven them with Raylan, spent nights in open fields and next to the old millpond. They’d gone skinny dipping at the lake hours after their classmates had gone home, laid on the grass to dry and watched the moon set, had watched Raylan’s face light up with laughter under the stars.

Harlan, where folks tutted about Raylan’s bruises when he walked into a store, where every time Boyd went to the bakery Mrs. Cawood flattened out his dollars and held them up to the light, said she wasn’t going to accept some no-account Crowder boy’s counterfeit bills.

It was all Harlan, the churchyard and the shops, the bakery and the hills, and Raylan could walk away without any regrets, without a backwards glance. Boyd understood why, most days, knew how hard Raylan worked to never think of what he’d be leaving behind.

But, right at that particular moment, Boyd desperately wanted to punch Raylan in his pompous face.

So he did, and they went crashing off the hood of the truck and onto the ground, blood in Boyd’s teeth and Raylan collecting his third black eye that month, April almost over and May nipping at their heels like an insolent pup.

The fight didn’t last. Boyd’s anger went up like black powder and flint, a flash of fire and the echo of a gunshot; and Raylan was always angry, had years of practice keeping his fury banked under layers of cold ash so it didn’t burn down the whole damn town.

They sat, panting, on the ground next to the truck. Raylan shook out his fists, stretching and curling his fingers to check for injuries that would ruin the upcoming game. Boyd spat blood into the dirt, pressed a palm to the warm, spongy place on his cheekbone where Raylan’s fist had landed, and thought for the first time that maybe Shelly Lynn wasn’t quite as stupid as she’d seemed.

* * *

Boyd tried to pay more attention after that, hoping to talk Raylan down before he killed someone with all the rage pooling like blood in his mouth and on his scraped fists, but Boyd could sooner have caught a tornado in a coke bottle than found a quiet moment with Raylan.

If they weren’t playing baseball — Boyd’s daddy pleased to see him out with Johnny, Johnny and Raylan getting along as well as they ever did when their team’s pride was on the line — they were at school, or running late to yet another senior party at the lake, or at the ridge with a couple of girls. And no matter what they did, Raylan stayed angry.

He swung at the ball like it was his daddy’s head, stomped furiously through Evarts’s hallowed halls, cut through the cold lake water faster than a shark and just as deadly, pounded into the girl of the week like he couldn’t decide if he wanted to fuck her or fuck her up.

It didn’t matter, Boyd reminded himself roughly. School was out in less than a week, three days to the first play-off game, Johnny talking Boyd’s ear off about all the scouts that might come recruiting for the farm leagues. Fourteen days until June. Raylan would only be angry for two more weeks, and then he would have everything he ever wanted and he would be gone.

Boyd had money on the Black Bears, for the game, because not only were his cousin and Raylan on the team, but the Redskins’ pitcher was Dickie Bennett, and hell if Boyd was betting on him. Of course, Boyd had also set himself up as Harlan’s only school sports bookie, so he’d be making a few hundred whichever way the wind blew.

(Mrs. Cawood might have accepted those dollar bills, if she’d known that Boyd was collecting them from her son every week, counting his profit out of Everett Cawood III’s bad bets. She thought folks like Crowders and Givenses were nothing but a blight on the county’s good name. Maybe Raylan thought so, too. Boyd would prove them both wrong, one day.)

He predicted Johnny’s pitches. It was easy to do, having watched the team at practice every goddamned day for months. Boyd knew who hit fouls and who would knock them into the next inning with a pop fly, was currently impressing all Bowman’s knotheaded friends with his ability to read the future in a batter’s stance or the shift of a player on second base. However, there was no way Boyd could have foretold how the game would actually go, which was “straight to hell.”

Raylan was striding up to the batter’s box, bottom of the fifth and two outs, Doyle Bennett under the catcher’s mask and Dickie on the mound. He settled the helmet onto his head, and Boyd couldn’t see Raylan’s smug grin, but he saw it reflected in Dickie’s reddening face. Raylan’s grin was a reminder that so far he’d hit everything Dickie could pitch, scored a run every time he came up to bat.

Boyd leaned forward — “Double,” he predicted to the kids gathered around him, “Raylan hits it to centerfield, Graves will make it from second to home.” — hands clasped and knees bouncing, watching the curl of Dickie’s fingers around the ball.

Watching, seconds later, as Raylan shattered his own bright future right along with Dickie Bennett’s knee.

* * *

Dickie had it coming.

There wasn’t anything else Raylan could have done, on the ground with the wind knocked out of him, Dickie’s cleats headed for Raylan’s face. Dickie had probably sharpened the damn things, Harlan’s own Ty Cobb.

Raylan wasn’t sorry. He wasn’t sorry when Dickie’s knee gave way with a nauseating crunch, or when Dickie started screaming or when he’d fainted, face drained of blood and sickly gray.

Raylan rolled to his feet, still gripping the bat.

The field was a seething mass of uniforms edged with red or blue, every player and the water boys pouring out of the dugout as soon as the fight had begun, umpires and coaches trying to haul them apart.

Doyle Bennett snarled at Raylan. Raylan lifted his bat, but Johnny Crowder tackled Doyle before he could pounce, Johnny’s eyes flashing and his teeth sharp. Forty teenaged boys or more on the field and at least half of them alphas, the rest aiming to be. There was no way the coaches would get them under control in time to finish the game.

There was no point in Raylan finishing the game, not when he’d just ended his baseball career before it had a chance to begin.

He peered into the stands, squinting through air warped by the heat of the stadium lights. His family was there, somewhere, but he didn’t bother searching them out. Raylan knew who he was looking for, and where to find him. Boyd always sat in right field, a straight line from where Raylan played second base and halfway up the stands. He always took the same seat — even if it was the other team’s territory, even if someone had already claimed the whole bleacher, or thought that they had.

Raylan cupped a hand over his eyes, searching for Boyd’s slender silhouette. Boyd was no doubt standing on his bleacher to peer over the other spectators, everyone in the stands shouting at the melee taking place on the field, the audience to Raylan’s gladiatorial debut.

Boyd wasn’t there.

Bowman was, his stocky bulk and shiny letter jacket easy to find, surrounded by other football players and their omega girls. Merle was hollering for Johnny to rip out Doyle’s throat, fists waving in the air. But Boyd was gone.

Raylan felt like he’d been kicked in the ribs again, the breath slammed out of him, gasping for air he couldn’t get.

He wasn’t sorry about Dickie’s knee, dammit; Boyd should know that, he should know that Raylan wasn’t sorry and he wasn’t going to be sorry, and where the fuck was Boyd, where _was_ he, Raylan needed –

Boyd vaulted the six-foot chain-link fence separating the bleachers from the field and hit the ground without breaking stride. He was twice as fast as their best base runner, flying across the infield in worn sneakers and black jeans. He didn’t seem to notice that the rest of the bleachers took that as their cue to follow, high schoolers and family members swarming the field, turning it into one more Harlan battleground. He wasn’t looking at anything but Raylan.

“Raylan,” he was saying, over and over. Too far away to be heard, but Raylan could read that word off Boyd’s lips from a mile away, knew his name best when it tripped off Boyd’s silver tongue.

Boyd slowed down seconds too late and bowled both of them into the grass, Raylan on his back and breathless again, Dickie’s cleats replaced by Boyd’s wide eyes and pale face. “Goddammit. Goddammit to hell. _Raylan_.” Raylan’s name was the wild cry of an animal surprised by a trap, Othello with his hands around Desdemona’s neck.

“I ain’t sorry,” Raylan panted, once he could force the words out of his empty lungs and past the sharp pain in his ribs. “I ain’t sorry, Boyd. I ain’t.”

“You ain’t thinking, is what you ain’t!” Boyd retorted savagely, breath gusting across Raylan’s face (mustard on a hotdog, whiskey in his coke). “Dickie’s been winding you up for months, and I know it. We’ll just tell Coach, and he can tell the scouts –”

Raylan smiled. Shook his head to feel the ground press against the back of his skull. Everything seemed very bright: colorful halos around the stadium lights, gold flecks in Boyd’s muddy eyes, light glowing pink through the shell of his ears.

“I took out a boy’s knee,” he whispered, still smiling. Boyd was beautiful. Raylan didn’t let himself see it, not normally, but it didn’t stop it being true. Boyd, with his dark looks and square jaw, fierce in his defense of Raylan. “There ain’t no coming back from that. Coach has me on second, but I’m not quick enough to play infield for the pros. I’ve got the best batting average in our region, but that’s hitting off pitchers like your cousin, and he’s no Roger Clemens.”

“That’s your daddy talking,” Boyd growled, but Raylan felt Boyd’s chest sag onto his. Boyd might not believe it, but he was smart enough to know that it’s what the scouts would think, when they crossed Raylan’s name off their lists.

Boyd wasn’t wrong. It _was_ Raylan’s daddy talking, running off his mouth during dinner, going to games so he could point out where Raylan came up short. But just because Arlo had said it, didn’t mean it wasn’t true.

Arlo had been talking since he’d gotten out of prison two months ago, talking to Coach and the principal and the goddamn gas station attendant, delighted to discuss each and every one of his son’s flaws.

Raylan’s grades weren’t good enough for scholarships, and like hell was Arlo paying for his bitch of a beta son to go to college, where they taught you to put on airs and claim to be better than your kin.

Raylan’s batting was fine but his throwing arm was weak, and even if he made it to a farm league the majors would never take him if he couldn’t throw.

Raylan would never get out of Harlan, was good for nothing but the mines or maybe busting knees for the Crowders like his old man. After all, Arlo had heard it around town that Raylan Givens handed out more bruises than his daddy ever did, and he already knew that Raylan didn’t mind bending over for the oldest Crowder boy.

Arlo was impossible to avoid, though Raylan stayed late at practice, drove to school early — found Boyd in the parking lot half the time, sleeping rough, and Raylan should have asked about that, but he didn’t want to know — and was away much of the week for games. He could hear Arlo wherever he went, crouched over second base or walking the halls and tussling with Boyd, concentrating on their math homework or kissing the cherry chapstick off a girl.

Raylan couldn’t shut Arlo up, couldn’t shut out his voice. It gave him a headache he couldn’t shake, coupled with the twist in his gut whenever he looked at Boyd and found Boyd looking back like he was trying to sear Raylan’s face into his memory, graduation dangling between them like a hangman’s noose. It made him irritable, set him starting fights to make everything go quiet for a while.

He hadn’t believed Arlo, but he should have. He should have seen the truth of it years ago. Raylan had been a fool thinking he was good enough to get out of Harlan, that he could show up his old man so Arlo had no choice but to choke on his poisonous tongue and act proud of his son.

 

This had been their first play-off game. It was meant to be a walkaway. The Black Bears were seeded high — Johnny was a decent pitcher and Raylan was pounding out several runs a game — and the Redskins were at the bottom of the list, weaselly Dickie Bennett the cream of a sorry crop.

Boyd joked that hating the Bennetts was in Raylan’s blood, but Raylan didn’t mind Coover or Doyle so long as they stayed out of his way, and he’d never spoken to the matriarch of the clan. It was just Dickie, a scrawny beta strutting around like he had to bend his legs to make room for his alpha balls, his nasal voice spewing something guaranteed to rile up Raylan.

Raylan hit a triple off Dickie’s fastball in the first inning, came up to bat again in the third and made it home on what should have been a double, the Redskins’ fielding just as bad as Dickie’s curveball.

He’d grinned at Dickie, walking up to bat in the fifth, smarmy as he could get. “I do appreciate you winning us the game, Dick,” he’d said, and stepped into the box.

The pitch would have broken Raylan’s nose if he hadn’t leaped out of the way, no matter what the umpire said.

That ball was the first punch, the bell to signal the fight. Raylan went for Dickie, Johnny went for the first baseman, and Mike tried to take on all the outfielders at once.

There was nothing else Raylan could have done. Dickie fought dirty, and he was half a second from crushing his cleats into Raylan’s face. There was no time to roll away, or let go of the bat and try to protect his eyes. (The truth of it was, Raylan hadn’t tried.)

“Didn’t think you were so scared of the ball,” Dickie had taunted as they rolled into the dirt of the pitcher’s mound, Raylan swinging his fist at Dickie’s pointy rat face and Dickie trying to gouge out Raylan’s eyes. “No wonder your daddy’s so disappointed, his only son a frightened beta bitch.”

 _I knew you’d never get that temper under control_ , Arlo said disdainfully, echoing through Raylan’s skull. _Should’ve ignored your mother and drowned you when I had the chance._

Arlo distracted Raylan, gave Dickie time to scramble away and kick Raylan hard in the ribs when he tried to follow. “Little beta bitch,” Dickie hissed, grinning nastily at Raylan. “And what does that make your Crowder friend? His daddy’s got it even worse than yours, raising an alpha faggot who goes ass up for a beta boy. Do you think he’ll still want you, once I crush your pretty face?”

_Everybody knows you’re no alpha, Boyd Crowder! You’re nothing more than Raylan’s bitch, panting after his dick! Wish you’d been born with a cunt, I bet, so you could give him pups like the bitch you’re desperate to be!_

Raylan had grabbed the bat off the ground, taken aim at Dickie and Arlo and Jimmie Louise, and made the last, best hit of the game.

“I’m not sorry,” he whispered again, still laid out flat on the ground, pinned down by nothing more than the press of Boyd’s forehead to his.

“Raylan,” Boyd murmured against his cheek, eyes dark with misplaced grief, Raylan’s name an accusation and a lament.

“I’m not,” he insisted, responding to the novels Boyd always wrote into his name. He inhaled to say more, choked when his lungs came up against the ribs Dickie had kicked in — then the police swarmed onto the field, and hauled them away.


	6. Chapter 6

“Is he home, ma’am?”

Frances Givens sighed and stepped back from the door, waving Boyd in.

“Boyd Crowder.”

She said Boyd’s name with twice as many syllables as it came with, and Boyd resisted the unwonted impulse to apologize for whatever crimes he had or might have committed in his short life.

“Ma’am.”

Frances leveled shrewd brown eyes — Raylan’s eyes — at Boyd, and folded her arms over her stained apron. “I suppose you’re going to suggest I pay my sister a visit? Again?”

Boyd scratched his head and blinked guilelessly at the mole above her left eyebrow. “Well, I’m certain Miss Helen would be pleased to have your company,” he said deferentially. Two weeks ago he might have stuttered, but by now he and Mrs. Givens were old hands at this particular waltz.

“Surely she would, as she’s been so ‘pleased to have my company’ the last three times I dropped by this week.” Boyd opened his mouth to respond, and Raylan’s mother glared it shut. “Save your pretty bullshit, son,” she told him. “I know you already made certain Arlo is at the VFW and like to stay there till close. Now untie my apron so I can leave you to holler at the wall.”

She spun around, and Boyd dutifully untied the apron and caught it when she flung it his way. “You’re lucky I made two pies,” she said, as if Boyd’s appearance was unexpected, as if he hadn’t shown up every afternoon once Arlo was gone. “Fetch me one from the window. If I’m going to harass my sister, I’d best not show up empty handed.”

Boyd walked into the kitchen, footsteps echoing like the house had been abandoned years ago. It was entirely too quiet for a place that had three live people inside, even if two of them did have tombstones waiting in the yard. He hung the apron on its hook and lifted one of the pies gently out of the window where it was cooling, the pan still warm against his palms.

Mrs. Givens was putting on lipstick, when he came back into the room, her mouth a down-turned scarlet smear on her tired face. She sighed again, took the pie and waited for Boyd to open the screen door.

It wasn’t until she was standing on the porch that she spoke, Boyd just inside the door, a reversal of their positions from a few minutes before.

“You’d better pull off one of your miracles,” she said, speaking in a whisper, though Raylan didn’t seem to hear them when they’d tried to shout him down. “If he doesn’t come out of his room soon, Arlo’s going to saw through the door and drag the boy out by his ear.”

They exchanged a long, weighted look. It didn’t need saying that Arlo Givens would be the worst possible person to put in a room with Raylan.

“I’ll take care of it, Mrs. Givens,” Boyd promised firmly, because the first step in convincing other people was convincing yourself. “You tell Miss Helen I said hello.”

 

Raylan’s window faced the drive, and Boyd knew the stubborn son of a bitch could hear his mother leave, same as he had heard Boyd’s truck rumble in. Same as he could hear them calling through his door, and chose not to respond.

Boyd had given Raylan two weeks to mourn, after the incident with the bat and Dickie Bennett’s knee. Not that Raylan had seemed too upset while he was ruining his potential baseball career — had seemed more than a little drunk off the destruction, and wholly unrepentant — but Boyd figured that once it had time to settle in past the concussion, Raylan would regret it something fierce.

Raylan hadn’t shown up to the last few days of school, and he hadn’t walked at graduation; but neither had most of their class, too busy starting the after-party early out at the lake. Boyd had thought he was giving Raylan time to lick his wounds and accept the fact that he wouldn’t be joining the minor leagues come June, and instead he’d just provided Raylan with fourteen days to entrench himself more firmly into his foxhole.

If it hadn’t been for Arlo, Boyd would have camped outside Raylan’s door — the boy had to take a shit sometime, and he sure wasn’t doing that in his room. He considered sticking around despite Arlo’s teeth and his gun, but finally decided it wasn’t worth getting shot just to lure Raylan out of his room.

Of course, Boyd was fairly certain that if it hadn’t been for Arlo, Raylan wouldn’t have hit a home run with Dickie Bennett’s knee, and Raylan would therefore be contracted to the farm leagues and not locked in his room.

“Raylan!” Boyd hollered up the stairs, to dispel the silence hanging like black bunting through the house. “I have in my possession a bottle of whiskey, which I purchased with my own money –”

More or less. It had been Boyd’s money, when he spent it, and Merle couldn’t prove that Boyd had cheated at cards. It wasn’t Boyd’s fault that Cousin Merle was too stupid to count.

“– and your mama left us a pie. I’ll eat it without you,” he goaded, because if Raylan wanted to act like a toddler in a sulk then Boyd would damn well treat him like one. “Don’t you think I won’t.”

In a ritual they’d maintained for two weeks, Boyd banged the door so it rattled on its hinges and Raylan didn’t say a word. Accustomed to this — and fucking sick of it — Boyd propped himself up on the wall facing Raylan’s room and cracked open the bottle of cheap whiskey he’d bought the day before, toasting the battered but impassive door.

“Marla got mated last week.”

This was how it had gone for two weeks, Raylan silent and Boyd recounting mundane details from the outside world. It wasn’t anything Boyd hadn’t done before — gathering up late-blooming flowers and fallen leaves for his bed-ridden mother, telling her how he had won the county spelling bee, how Bowman had bitten the third-grade teacher again, leaving out the parts of his day where teachers told him not to worry about his unfinished homework, or church women patting him on the head and sniffling over "poor Clary's boys."

“She was bitten by some alpha up in Cumberland. I know how you feel about claiming, but Marla appears to have had none of your qualms. Maybe she believes in true mates. You remember Marla? You fucked her, must have been junior year. I know there was a full moon out, because I had a fantastic view. Omega like that ...” Boyd trailed off, because he had no desire to describe Marla’s many and voluptuous attributes to Raylan’s unfeeling door.

“You know what?” he decided, hoisting himself back onto his feet, exhausted by two weeks of talking to a wall.

Boyd could admit that he’d been dreading June, that — for an instant that first night — he’d been _glad_ that Raylan had busted up Dickie’s knee and scared away the scouts, because it meant Raylan wouldn’t be hightailing it out of Harlan like his ass was on fire. It meant they had time to make different plans. There were other ways out of Harlan, if that’s what Raylan wanted: they let you sign up with a buddy, in the Army, and Boyd was good with a gun and even better with a stick of dynamite. But there was no fucking pleasure in keeping Raylan for a few months longer, if the jackass didn’t ever come out of his room.

“Fuck this.”

He emphasized this declaration with a solid kick to the door, which didn’t break down the door but might have broken Boyd’s big toe.

“Fuck you, Raylan!” He took another swig of cheap whiskey, felt it burn through his esophagus on its way to perforate his liver. “Consider this my grand finale, the last night of Boyd Crowder’s one-man show. I start at the mine tomorrow, so I won’t be returning to sit vigil at your goddamn door.”

He’d been holding that information back, hoping maybe it would get Raylan so het up he’d forget his sulk, open the door and start shouting at Boyd about dying down a mineshaft like he always did. But there was nothing, not even the rustle of Raylan’s sheets.

Boyd took his bottle and stomped down the stairs, old wood creaking ominously under his feet. Saner men would have gotten into their vehicles and driven home, or headed up to the lake where the class of 1989 was bound and determined to stay drunk until they ran out of beer.

Saner men would have thought twice before befriending a Givens in the first place, and three times before befriending _Raylan_.

Boyd thudded out the back door and trampled down the overgrown grass to dig around in the shed, holding the whiskey bottle with his teeth so he had both hands free to haul the ladder around to the side of the house facing the drive.

The window was shut, of course, the latch flipped and the curtains pulled closed. Boyd scaled the ladder, perched himself directly beside the window, took a thoughtful sip of whiskey, and then leaned out to knock the window loose from the frame.

He’d moved too quickly. Boyd realized that immediately — or, right after the ladder gave a dizzying lurch, swaying away from the house and offering to arc Boyd through the air like a third-rate circus act, send him face-first into the Givenses' driveway, adding his grave to their lawn.

_Boyd Crowder, 1970-1989. Died of being Raylan Givens’s friend._

He clutched at the clapboards with his free hand, and slowly, _extremely_ slowly, the ladder settled back against the house.

Raylan’s curtains twitched.

Well, wasn’t that nice to know. Apparently Raylan _did_ care if Boyd died in his front lawn.

“Open the damn window!” Boyd demanded, knocking the whiskey bottle against the pane.

Not that he expected Raylan to surrender. Worried about Boyd’s life expectancy or not, Raylan was an obstinate bastard, and Boyd knew he wouldn’t get a response.

“Fine,” he muttered. “Then get out of the way!”

He waited for as long as it took him to gulp down another swallow of whiskey, then pulled out the hammer he’d stolen from the shed and swung it right through Raylan’s windowpane.

“Jesus fucking Christ!” Raylan shouted from inside the bedroom, nothing between them but shards of glass and curtains blowing in the summer breeze.

Boyd hummed in response, ignoring Raylan’s cursing in favor of knocking out all the glass fragments left in the frame, since he did not intend to gut himself breaking into Raylan’s stuffy room. Also, the more air in that bedroom the better. Boyd could smell the dirty laundry from outside.

“Boyd, what the fuck do you think you’re doing to my house?”

Raylan ripped the curtain back, and had to hold up an arm to shield his eyes from the afternoon sun.

It was the first anybody had seen of Raylan since he’d gotten out of the hospital a month ago. He was pale. His hair was greasy and falling into his eyes, and he really didn’t have as much of a beard as he should have if he hadn’t shaved for four weeks. His stomach was caved in toward his spine like those cartoons of kids in the USSR — Boyd strongly suspected Raylan had been surviving on leftovers and a stash of expired candy bars — and his boxers hung loosely off his bony hips. His cheek bore the imprint of his pillow, and there were scratches on the tops of his bare feet where Boyd had caught them with flying bits of glass.

“’Bout time you showed your ugly mug,” Boyd declared, dropping the hammer so he could pass Raylan the whiskey. The hammer bounced off the ground and skittered down the hill toward Raylan’s grave. Raylan took the whiskey and scowled at Boyd. “Come on downstairs, and we can pack up your mama’s pie and go for a drive.”

“Get down from there, you fucking imbecile,” Raylan replied hoarsely, his voice rusty with disuse. “Before Harlan makes the evening news. ‘Drunk white trash teen dies falling off ladder, after breaking into best friend’s house with a hammer and a handle of cheap booze.’”

“Who said you were my best friend, asshole?” Boyd retorted, but when Raylan stuck one hand out to hold onto the ladder Boyd obediently clambered down. He might even have been grinning, at the sight of Raylan’s ugly face, at his best friend’s curmudgeonly voice — but alpha men didn’t smile at their friends like lovesick fools, and Boyd tilted his face toward the ground so that Raylan couldn’t see.

“If I ain’t your best friend,” Raylan called, disappearing from the window and hopefully putting on some clean clothes. Raylan could do with a good dousing in the lake, and maybe a scrubbing with Granny Crowder’s lye soap. “Then I pity whoever is, since you probably razed _his_ house to the ground.”

Raylan chuckled at his own joke, but then it got quiet. Quiet like it had been for the last two weeks, Boyd’s palms against Raylan’s bedroom door, pleading for a boy who never came.

Boyd gripped the ladder and debated climbing right back up, just to make certain Raylan hadn’t hidden under the bed or locked himself in the closet where there was no window for Boyd to smash.

Then Raylan slammed out the front door, whiskey in one hand and cooler in the other, lank hair tucked under his cap and concave stomach hidden under a t-shirt and some jeans. He even smelled like he’d put on deodorant, and Boyd’s alpha nose was grateful, though Raylan didn’t truly smell all that terrible. Stale and unwashed, certainly, but different than the locker room reek of adolescent boys. Granted, Boyd was hardly going to go sniffing Raylan’s pits to figure out precisely what that difference was.

“Well?” Raylan said, when he’d slung the cooler into the bed of his own truck — the truck that had sat derelict for a month, its tires probably rotting off and its gas siphoned out to fuel Arlo’s schemes — and unlocked the doors. Boyd was still holding onto the ladder and staring at his wan, unkempt friend.

“Are you coming, Boyd, or did you want to smash all the other windows in my house? Maybe throw a few eggs, TP the trees?”

He smirked, like he didn’t have shadows under his eyes or a tic in his cheek, like he hadn’t shattered his dreams and then spent a month doing god knew what in that airless room.

“I should have left you to rot in there,” Boyd huffed, snatching the bottle back from Raylan before going around the truck to his seat. “You’re lucky I’d do just about anything for a slice of your mama’s pie.”

Raylan’s grin softened into something a little more genuine, but he didn’t respond. And Boyd didn’t mind the silence, as long as he could look over and see Raylan’s long fingers curled around the wheel, the brim of his cap and the crooked line of his nose dropping to the sharp line of his jaw. The truck complained for a minute, but eventually shuddered and jerked into life, and Raylan backed them all the way down the drive.

He waited until they were cruising down the main road to speak, waited until Boyd had the bottle at his lips and a slug of whiskey in his mouth.

Then Raylan glanced over at Boyd, said: “You know if they’re still hiring for your shift, at the mine?” and watched Boyd spit whiskey all down his shirt, impassive as the goddamn door.

* * *

The hiring manager’s answer was a resounding no.

No, they were not hiring for Boyd’s shift at the mine. They were not hiring for _any_ shift at the mine. Hadn’t the boys heard about the wildcat strikes all through Appalachia? About the Clean Air Act coming? Any more attention from the mine inspectors and they’d need to lay everybody off but the boss. No, no, and _no_. Even if they were hiring, they certainly weren’t hiring eighteen-year-old boys with no experience, not when they could have their pick of qualified men.

“Why, sir, that does sound like a sensible business model if I’ve ever heard one.”

Boyd had a knack for seeming less dangerous and far more docile than he truly was — a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a fox tipping his hat to the hens — and Raylan wondered how the manager could sit two feet from Boyd’s laced fingers and deferential nod and not notice the predatory glint in his dark eyes. But Boyd had a tongue dipped in honey, and most folks never realized they’d been bamboozled, not even after Boyd had walked away.

In this particular instance, Boyd walked away with a promotion to powder man and a job for Raylan, the manager still smiling as he shook their hands and sent them on their way.

 

“You ready to become a real Harlan man, Raylan Givens?”

Boyd grinned, thumbs threaded through his belt loops, jogging backwards toward the mine entrance so he could keep his sparkling, firecracker eyes on Raylan.

Though Boyd’s teasing didn’t quite cover the misgivings lurking in his shadowed gaze, where he was scanning Raylan for any sign of hesitation or doubt. He knew how Raylan felt about the mines; about being dropped into the pitch black, handed a shovel and told to dig his own grave.

None of Raylan’s feelings had changed. But what else was there now, but the mines? Raylan couldn’t leave Harlan — didn’t have the contract to a farm league, didn’t have any money to spare with Arlo threatening to charge rent — and what was the point in avoiding the mines, if Harlan was never going to let him go?

_Raylan Givens, 1970-1989. Disappointing Son. Failed Athlete. Never Left Harlan Alive._

“Raylan?” They had made it into the locker rooms somehow, a trailer with lockers that would bust open if you tapped them with a firm fist. Boyd tossed a clean pair of dark blue coveralls on Raylan’s head.

“Yeah,” he answered blankly, dropping onto the bench to unlace his boots and change.

The last vestiges of forced levity left Boyd, at Raylan's hollow tone, tumbled off the sagging edges of his smile. Raylan looked around for something to distract him, and saw four older men watching them from lockers farther down.

“Aren’t you going to introduce me?” he asked, tipping his head to indicate the other men as he peeled out of his jeans. It didn’t feel any different than changing with the team before a game, out of his school clothes and into a uniform that he had worn for four years. A uniform that he would never wear again, never sweat under stadium lights, eyes on the ball and waiting to swing.

“Yeah, Crowder,” hollered one of the men, no one bothering to pretend they hadn’t been listening in. “Ain’t you going to tell us who the new boy is?”

Boyd’s frown deepened. He peered anxiously at Raylan for another second or two. Then he flattened his lips and exhaled loudly through his nose, bowing to Raylan’s play and introducing him to the crew. By the time Boyd had extricated himself from several rounds of extended introductions their shift had started, and they were headed down the shaft and into the thick, coal-dark of the mine.

The elevator moved slowly, weighted with miners and creaking with every foot it dropped below the surface of the earth. The man next to Raylan — a Scroggins, you could always tell a Scroggins by their receding chin, though Boyd had only identified him as “Ronnie the cutter” — had apparently played first base for the Black Bears a few years before Raylan had joined the team, and still went to every baseball game he could manage when he wasn’t at the mine. Raylan nodded politely, and didn’t think about the feel of a bat in his hands, the crack of a homerun or a shattered knee.

It was noisy in the elevator. Raylan could barely hear the Scroggins cutter reciting season stats in his ear, and there were ten other guys and the clank of metal and gears against stone. Boyd was a few feet away talking to an older man about blowing shit up, but Raylan only knew that because he could recognize the shape and heft of words on Boyd’s chapped lips. He was also intimately familiar with the light in Boyd’s eyes, the flare of an event horizon, the promise of an explosion soon to occur.

Somehow, despite all this ruckus, once Scroggins started talking baseball Boyd’s ears pricked up under his hardhat. His gaze promptly shifted from where he had been casting uneasy glances at Raylan, moving to glower balefully - and ineffectually - at Ronnie. Boyd likely would have forbidden everyone else from _speaking_ to Raylan if he’d thought it might have any success, or attempted to ban any talk of mining accidents, mining safety, baseball or life trapped underground.

Boyd needed to stop fretting. They had spent the past thirty-six hours within a few feet of each other: from a broken window to a pause in his Aunt Helen’s driveway, so Boyd could tell his Aunt Frances that he’d kidnapped her son and vandalized her home; then onward to the diner for hamburgers on Boyd’s dime, where Boyd had gotten ketchup all over his chin because he was too busy eyeing Raylan to aim his food into his mouth. (Raylan hadn’t minded that so much. It had provided a lost month’s worth of laughter, watching Boyd open his mouth and shove french fries into his cheek.)

After that, Raylan had dragged them up to the lake with the rest of their class — the ones that weren’t already mated or working — to get away from Boyd’s penetrating gaze.

That plan had been singularly unsuccessful. Raylan had found himself roped into a conversation with earnest, intoxicated Bob Sweeney, while Boyd shared a joint with his cousins on the far side of the bonfire and gazed at Raylan through the flames. They’d wound up sleeping out in their field, mouths sticky with pie and whiskey, smelling like bonfire and smoke. The last thing Raylan had seen — sated and drunk and Boyd within reach again after nearly a month of lonely days — were dark eyes bright with moonlight, Boyd propped on his side, watching as Raylan tumbled into sleep.

Raylan wasn’t fucking fragile. He just hadn’t wanted to talk to anyone for a few weeks, was all. He was entitled to a little time, thirteen years of baseball and all his hope lost in one game. But now Boyd seemed to think Raylan would vanish if he so much as blinked.

“Fuck off,” Raylan mouthed at Boyd, absolutely certain Boyd could see it despite the poor lighting in the elevator car.

He was fine. He hadn’t gone crazy, like Boyd thought: lots of folks became coal miners, in Harlan, and why shouldn’t Raylan sign up for the only legitimate job in the county that garnered a decent wage?

Then the elevator stuttered to a halt, tossing them all out of Charon’s ferry and into some lower circle of hell.

There were lamps run down the tunnels, shaken by the movement of coal cars and the vibrations of machines so that they guttered like candle flames in a breeze. The lights were overwhelmed by the unremitting, unbroken black: black air, black walls, black floors, black ceilings, black everywhere but the whites of the men’s eyes.

Someone pounded Raylan good-naturedly on the shoulder, pushing the “soft-pawed new kid” out into the tunnel winding down into the catacombs. He inhaled, and found himself choking on the faint reek of the sewers, coal dust and shit and rotten eggs.

“It’s the methane,” Ronnie the cutter explained, when Raylan grimaced. “We shovel it out with the coal.”

The man next to him — a Napier, if Raylan had to guess, the Napiers were prone to straight noses and beady eyes — inhaled with relish. “That’s a smell ‘ll put hair on your scrawny chest, son,” he declared, pounding his own beefy chest in demonstration. “Better than my woman’s perfume.”

“I believe that,” the man who’d been talking to Boyd said, squeezing Boyd's shoulder before stepping out in front of everyone and settling his hat on his head. “There’s a whole mess of things that smell better than your woman, Alf. Now let’s stop jawing and get down to the seam.”

“That’s Cullen Briggs.” Boyd’s hat knocked into Raylan’s when he bent his head to speak, closer than he had been in the elevator. “He’s the foreman for our crew.”

The other men were swinging into the empty coal cars, hitching a ride down the maze of tunnels to the end of the rail and their edge of the untapped seam. Boyd moved to follow, and Raylan felt Boyd’s leaving tug clear through him, looked down to find his fingers twisted tightly in the navy fabric of Boyd’s coveralls.

He let go quick, but not quick enough to hide it from Boyd.

“Raylan,” Boyd said, the cluck of a mother hen, the brim of his hat too small to cover the concern in his wide eyes.

“Let’s _go_ ,” Raylan snarled, shoving Boyd toward the cars. “You’re wasting daylight, Crowder.”

“Ain’t none of it down here to waste,” Boyd retorted, but he followed Raylan into the empty car; shouted the whole way out like they were on the world’s slowest, dullest roller coaster, his fool voice and the lightning crack of his grin staving off the dark.

They arrived at the bottom and Briggs put a shovel in Raylan’s hand, clapped him on the back and sent him forward to dig his own grave. Fortunately, Raylan had been preparing for this moment since he was twelve years old, back when he’d still planned on popping a knot and batting home runs off Seaver in a real stadium. Back when he’d seen his name in marble, but had been fool enough to hope he might get away. Six years later, Raylan knew what happened to dreams in Harlan County. Nightmares stood a better chance of coming true: the mines would either pay Raylan’s way out of town, or bury him. Raylan didn’t much care which.

Unfortunately, he apparently still cared quite a lot about Boyd Crowder being a fucking moron with a death wish.

He discovered this character defect when Boyd slithered into the abyss of a fresh cut with a load of explosives and a cockeyed smirk to light his way.

It wasn’t stable in there. They hadn’t secured the cut, and besides, Boyd could hardly be trusted with Emulex in a mine filled with flammable gas when he’d _set his leg on fire_ with a Roman candle two months before.

“You’re letting him do this?” Raylan asked Briggs, hunched over to fit under the tunnel’s five-foot ceiling and peering in horror at the chasm where Boyd had disappeared.

Briggs shrugged, and thankfully didn’t seem too offended by an eighteen-year-old pup questioning the foreman’s judgment on his first shift. “Kid likes to blow shit up,” he rumbled, as if that were any reason to _let_ him.

“Boyd likes to get drunk on moonshine and fish with dynamite!” Raylan retorted acerbically. “That don’t mean I pay him to do it!”

Briggs was still slapping his knee and chortling when Boyd eeled out of the cut and back into the tunnel, empty handed, his hat tipped sideways on his head and his face black as soot.

“Hey!” Boyd shouted, supposedly at the whole crew, since that’s what he was being paid for. He was looking at Raylan, though, giddy as a schoolgirl hoping to catch Raylan’s eye, grinning like a loon. He clutched the detonator in one dirty hand, and Raylan could see the promise of an explosion glowing in Boyd’s eyes, moonshine and the sparkle of a lit fuse and the glittering scales of some unlucky fish whose time had come.

Raylan hadn’t planned to smile in the mine, hadn’t expected to return Boyd’s expansive grin and murmur along as Boyd flung out his arms and hollered –

“Fire in the hole!”

The earth shook, and the ceiling popped. Coal dust billowed around Boyd like smoke in a disco. Raylan crouched there, watching the fire in Boyd’s eyes and the white slash of his grin against the black until Briggs slapped his shoulder and told him to get to work.

* * *

Working nights meant stumbling straight home to bed and sleeping until their next shift, but after a few weeks Raylan’s body adjusted and he stopped dozing off in the truck on the way home, or sleeping for fourteen hours a day.

Arlo was quiet most mornings, either hungover or still drunk, and he was generally gone by the afternoons when Raylan rubbed the sleep from his eyes and thudded downstairs. The Givens house was more peaceable than it had ever been. Though Raylan came home often enough and found his mama gone to Nobles Holler where his daddy couldn’t follow, so maybe it wasn’t more peaceable, and was only that Raylan had finally learned when not to be home.

“You don’t think we should stick around?” Boyd asked, on a night where they had no set plans and you could hear Raylan’s folks from the main road.

Raylan shook his head. He curled his fingers, gearing up for a fight with Boyd about Raylan’s sainted mama and his obligations as her loving son. Raylan knew how Boyd felt about mothers. Especially Raylan’s. Boyd didn’t say another word, though, just nodded like Raylan would make the right call, whatever it was, and drove them away.

“He’s meaner, when I’m there,” Raylan muttered defensively, up in arms from listening to his daddy get drunker and nastier through dinner until Raylan had chosen to don a jacket and wait for Boyd on the porch.

Boyd shrugged, nodded again, told Raylan to tune the radio to a station where they played guitars instead of beating them in a rage — Boyd had absolutely no appreciation for heavy metal — and then started talking about his plan to glue firecrackers to the tread of Merle’s shoes.

 

“You know,” Raylan said later, once there were several hours and half a case of beer between them and the Givenses' nightly domestic disputes. “You know Nobles Holler? I mean, you ain’t never been, I guess, but do you know it? Where the white women go, the omegas, when they can’t take it no more?”

“Yes,” Boyd replied mildly, but his gaze was keen despite the beer and the fact that it had rolled past midnight and well toward dawn. “I am familiar with it, though I can’t say I have ever been. Bo never did anything to Mama that she couldn’t stand.”

Raylan rolled his head to the right and grinned at Boyd. “’Course not,” he huffed. “Your daddy ain’t a knee breaker. He hires men like _my_ daddy for that.”

Bo Crowder wasn’t kind. Raylan knew that like he knew the shape of Boyd’s bruises when Bo learned that his eldest was still friends with the no-account Givens boy. Bo Crowder was a hillbilly crime lord who specialized in intimidation and made his money off other folks’ fear, with a side business in any drug that came into Harlan. But he had an appreciation for his possessions that men like Arlo seemed to lack, and whether or not Bo loved his omega mate or his alpha sons — well, they were _his_ , and he saw no advantage in destroying the things that belonged to him, not unless they offered him no choice.

“Mama runs up the hill to Nobles,” Raylan continued, the alcohol carving hills and valleys in his voice, the winding road up to a holler he’d never seen. “And Arlo goes up after her, but he never gets to her. Never has. They got patrols on the road, black alphas making sure no white men like my daddy make it into their holler.”

Boyd balled up his jacket behind his head and stretched his legs out until they hit the tailgate, lifted his bare feet to rest on the side of the truck. Boyd’s feet were as narrow as the rest of him, toes nearly long enough to hold his beer. Raylan traced the slender lines of them with his eyes, wondered if Boyd was ticklish there. Wondered how the calluses on his heels would feel pressed to the palms of Raylan's hands.

“Those patrols appear to have been successful, thus far,” Boyd declared. It was true: black folks had set down in Nobles Holler a hundred years before, and they hadn’t been uprooted yet. “Keeping white men out of their holler, giving white women like your mama a refuge in their distress.”

Because there had always been and would always be women like Frances Givens, women mated to alphas and betas who loved to mark their claims. Who loved to sink their fists and teeth into pretty, pristine skin until it bled. And no matter the changing laws - no matter the promise of a safe haven - those weak, spineless omegas would _always_ return to their mates.

 _You could be cherished_ , Frances Givens had once told Raylan. _If you'd allow it._ She had been drunk, of course — that was the only time she would acknowledge her only child as he truly was. When she was sober, Raylan’s mama preferred to forget that she had given birth to an omega boy, a useless bitch of a son.

Raylan had swiped the bottle off the table, snapped at her to shut up. He had watched her flinch, then driven off into the night, needing something to settle the ants crawling under his skin. Needing to find Boyd. Frances might have been drunk, but Raylan had been far too sober. Raylan knew that in Harlan, _cherished_ just meant _scarred_.

“That’s why there’s no point in trying to stop it,” he explained, though Boyd’s frown indicated he hadn’t understood. Boyd hadn’t had years to think about these things, sitting upstairs in his room with his hands over his ears, sitting in the passenger seat and watching black men beat his daddy into the dirt. “She’s only ever gone as far as Nobles, and she’s never stayed for more than a few days.” She’d never once taken Raylan with her, when she’d gone; proof she'd never intended to stay away.

“I thought maybe we could leave, once I’d saved up the money, but she don’t _want_ to leave, and Arlo ain’t going to wake up one morning and go soft. And if he ain’t afraid of a black alpha patrol that beats him bloody then he’s never going to be afraid of me." Raylan sighed, tipped the rest of the bottle down his throat, drowning the catch in his voice. "There’s no point in trying to change it, because that’s what it means to be mates.”

Boyd didn’t say anything, for a while, just stared at the moon and listened to the crickets and the owls in the trees, the harsh shriek of a mountain lion somewhere deep in the hills. “It’s not always like that,” he finally said, talking to the midnight sky. “Like it is with your folks.”

“Sure it is,” Raylan told him. “It ain’t different, just because they don’t crawl back as quick as mama, or hit as hard as Arlo does. It means less time in the hospital, maybe, but it’s the same damn thing. There’s no such thing as true mates.”

“I wish I could change your mind, Raylan Givens,” Boyd whispered, rolling languidly onto his stomach and peering at Raylan with mournful eyes.

Raylan snorted. Boyd was a romantic. (Of course he was, with his mama dead and his head full of too much literature, classic bullshit rhapsodizing about beloved omegas and true mates.) But Raylan knew real life didn’t hew to Boyd’s books — even Boyd, remarkable for his control, would one day claim a mate, would morph into an alpha as bloodthirsty as the rest — and all Boyd’s silver-tongued wishing couldn’t change Raylan’s mind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fair warning: I have done as much Google research as I could stand on coal mining, but there may be glaring errors. (Please correct them.) Also, your comments make my days brighter - which is true for any story, of course, but I just thought that I would say thank you again. :) (I promise they get together soon! And good lord, I started with three characters, and now I'm fairly certain I've invented an entire county of OCs.)


	7. Chapter 7

Summer slipped into autumn while Raylan was sleeping or underground, the days growing shorter and frost curling through the morning fog, a crystalline rime on the windshield of his truck when they climbed in at the end of shift, dawn creeping over the hills.

Time had slowed to a crawl, exhausted after a spring where March had sprinted straight into May. Where Raylan had struggled to hold on to a single golden afternoon, chewing gum at second base and watching Boyd take bets in the stands. Now every afternoon stretched out like molasses off a spoon, nothing to do in Harlan no matter that they were high-school graduates and men full-grown, flush with money from digging coal.

“I’m bored,” Raylan complained, leaning on the passenger door of his truck and trying to juggle a pack of cigarettes Boyd had lifted off Johnny the day before.

Raylan had stopped smoking, now that he coughed and spat mucus rimmed with black. He figured his lungs were expiring fast enough without the help. It had made him irritable for a week, the quitting, and Boyd had taken to leaving cigarettes in Raylan’s pockets, tucking them behind his ears. Rella had chided Boyd when she caught him at it. She called it leading Raylan into temptation, but Raylan knew the cigarettes were Boyd’s way of saying that Raylan was _choosing_ to quit — choosing his shitty mood — and so he didn’t get to take it out of Boyd’s hide.

“You could play basketball with Merle,” Boyd offered, from the cab of the truck. His knees were propped up on the dash, books in a disorderly pile next to him. Boyd was devouring the Harlan Public Library’s entire stock one book at a time, and therefore unsympathetic to Raylan’s plight.

Raylan reached through the open window and dug his knuckles into Boyd’s head, which caught Boyd’s attention and served to entertain Raylan for a few seconds until Boyd batted him away.

Boyd lifted his eyes from his newest book and looked around, gaze settling on a cluster of high school girls in halter tops and shorts loitering outside Gilliam’s, ice cream cones in hand and apparently immune to the autumn chill in the air.

“That blonde girl’s been eyeing you up for weeks,” he informed Raylan, though Raylan didn’t see how that was possible, since he hadn’t laid eyes on anyone but Boyd and the crew since June. “You could pass a few hours that way.” He glanced over at Raylan and smirked. “A few hours getting ice cream, that is. Otherwise it’s ten minutes on the ridge and you’re bored all over again.”

Raylan snatched Boyd’s book out of his hands and hit him in the nose with it.

“I last longer than you do,” he retorted, which might have been a lie, but at least Boyd had the decency not to say so aloud. He shaded his eyes to stare across the street, wondering which girl Boyd had singled out to serve up to Raylan. They hadn’t had any girls for a while, too busy and too tired, not to mention that most of the girls in their class would be claimed before summer was out, mating the only thing to do once you had your high school diploma in hand.

“Christ Boyd, those girls can’t be more than fourteen.” He recognized the one out in front, little Ava Randolph. She looked far more grown up than Raylan remembered her, when she had trailed him to the bus stop at the bottom of the hill, pink lunchbox and pigtails in her hair. “I’m bored, not aching to commit statutory rape.”

“Well, hell, Raylan.” Boyd gave an exaggerated sigh and set down his book, turning his full focus on Raylan. “I am only trying to help.” He scratched his head, dark hair falling forward into his eyes. “I took some Emulex home, last week. We could build a bomb.”

“Shh!” Raylan hushed Boyd and looked furtively down the street, expecting someone to accuse them of conspiracy to blow shit up. Though, come to think of it, no one in Harlan but Raylan would be surprised if he and Boyd quit digging coal and started blowing up bank vaults instead — they’d just be astonished that a Givens and a Crowder could work together without ripping out each other’s throats.

“You stole explosives?” he hissed, after a few seconds had passed and no one had reacted to Boyd’s offer to build bombs. “Are you trying to get us fired?”

“I am not,” Boyd promised solemnly. “Because then we would have absolutely no means to alleviate your boredom, and I don’t believe I would survive that unfortunate turn of events.”

Raylan harrumphed, tipped his baseball cap up and folded his arms over the car door, slouching to stick his head through the open window. Boyd sunk lower in his seat to dodge the brim of Raylan’s hat, let his head roll back until he was peering down his nose at Raylan, cheeks pink and peeling from Saturday sitting in the sun for Bowman’s game and Sunday fishing at the Forks with Raylan, soaking up the last of the summer heat.

“We could go to the movies?” Raylan suggested, peering up Boyd’s nose and counting the hairs to pass the time, crossing his eyes so Boyd looked like an alien with three nostrils and four eyes.

“We’ve seen ‘em all twice,” Boyd reminded him, folding his legs over each other like a contortionist and resting them against the dash. “Unless you wanted to skip work and drive to Lexington for a French film.”

“You’ve got twenty-nine nose hairs,” Raylan informed him helpfully. “And nostrils big enough to drive coal cars through.”

Boyd put one hand over his nose and used the other to haul the brim of Raylan’s cap down over his eyes, swearing Raylan was the most irritating person Boyd had ever met, and that included Merle and the entire Bennett clan. "Watch yourself, boy, or I'll start counting your warts." Boyd poked at Raylan's jaw to emphasize his point.

Raylan ducked away from Boyd's prodding finger, grinning. "Those are moles, asshole, not warts. And there are only two."

"There are only two so far," Boyd corrected, his hand darting out to tap the one under Raylan's left eye. He picked up his head, cutting off Raylan’s view of his nostrils and putting his eyes a few inches from Raylan’s. Raylan counted up the gold flecks in Boyd’s left iris instead, starting with the few near the outside and spiraling his way in. “But everyone knows you get warts from kissing frogs. Are you gonna keep kissing frogs?"

“I'm gonna shove one down your throat, you keep poking at my face," Raylan retorted, and Boyd grinned. Then he blinked and Raylan lost count of the flecks, which brought him back to the problem at hand, because once he’d numbered every abnormality on Boyd’s face there really would be nothing to do. “We could eat?”

Boyd let out a lingering sigh and stared pointedly through the windshield at the diner they had come out of less than an hour ago, arguing about what to do next. That had been before Raylan surrendered to the inevitable and allowed Boyd to drag him down the street to the library, which had staved off boredom for all of fifteen minutes or so.

Suddenly, Boyd sat straight up, dropped his feet back to the floor with a thud and slapped the worn leather of the seat. “Why, Raylan, I do believe I have an idea.”

“Yeah?” Raylan asked guardedly, because Boyd had plenty of ideas, and they generally led straight past temptation and into damnations such as stealing Emulex and building bombs.

Boyd flashed Raylan a smile brighter than his grin in the coal-dark mines. “My daddy may have purchased several new firearms this week.”

Raylan arched an eyebrow. “You want to build bombs _and_ shoot people? What do you think this is, Boyd, the Army?”

“ _Among them_ ,” Boyd continued over Raylan’s interruption, “are some old Colt revolvers which he declared useless and stuck in the shed.”

Boyd cocked his head and stared expectantly at Raylan. And Raylan tried to keep his eyes glazed with boredom, tried to appear uninterested in the fact that there were real, Wild West revolvers in the Crowders’ shed. It was a futile attempt, of course — Raylan wasn’t ever going to fool Boyd.

“Come on,” Boyd said, knocking his knuckles against Raylan’s. “Let’s go play Cowboys and Indians.”

“Ain’t we a little old to be playing cowboys?” Raylan protested, like he wasn’t already imagining the brim of his cap as the edge of a larger hat, the heels of his steel-toed mining boots jingling with spurs.

Boyd rolled his eyes grandly. “Raylan Givens,” he chided, gesturing at the pile of books next to him on the seat. “Don’t think I can’t see you checking Louis L’amour’s entire oeuvre out from our humble library.”

Raylan did not blush, because there was nothing wrong with reading a few Westerns. Or dragging Boyd to the drive-in the weekend they were playing _Shane_ , and sitting through the first ten minutes before realizing he’d forgotten to pick up their dates.

Besides, Boyd read books like _Tender is the Night_ ; at least enjoying Westerns didn’t make Raylan a girl.

“And you wouldn’t stop quoting _Lonesome Dove_ on Sunday. Scared off all the fish.”

“Your face scared off all the fish,” Raylan retorted. Boyd could complain all he wanted, but he had enjoyed _Lonesome Dove_. He had closed his book and sprawled out on the riverbank like a wildcat purring in the sun, eyes shut and face tilted toward Raylan, murmuring low complaints whenever Raylan stopped reading aloud.

“Fine.” Raylan huffed, because Boyd was smirking like Raylan was a fish and Boyd was holding a lit stick of dynamite. “There ain’t nothing else to do. I suppose we might as well go shooting imaginary Indians with your daddy’s guns.”

Boyd laughed triumphantly. Then cursed when Raylan pushed himself through the open window and into the cab, catching Boyd in the gut with an elbow and landing half in his lap.

“Lord God Almighty,” Boyd gasped, coughing, trying and failing to dislodge Raylan’s upper body from his lap. Finally Boyd gave up, grabbed Raylan’s belt, and hauled the rest of him ungracefully into the truck. “It is theatrics such as this, you jackass, which make the good, church-going people of Harlan suspicious of us.”

Raylan snorted disbelievingly, rolled over with his head propped up on the driver’s side door and his boots still hanging out the far window. “Oh, is that right?” he said wryly. “You sure it ain’t our names and our kin, or mayhap the fact that you celebrated graduation by blowing up the dais during the mayor’s speech?”

“Now how would you know that?” Boyd leaned out the window to tie Raylan’s bootlaces together, his forearm resting warm against Raylan’s shins. “You weren’t there. And, I might add, whatever talented soul did ‘blow up the dais,’ he ought to be applauded. It was a goddamned act of charity. The mayor would never have stopped talking, otherwise.”

“I’m not visiting you in prison,” Raylan told him, sliding down so that his knees bent and his ass pressed to the outside of Boyd’s thigh.

Boyd didn’t shift away. Boyd never minded Raylan in his space, (seemed to prefer him there, no more than a few layers of cotton away,) and at the moment his full attention was on recreating the Gordian knot with Raylan’s shoelaces.

Boyd didn’t know that Raylan was a freak taking three sups a day — would have taken more, but he couldn’t be driving to Lexington for refills every week — and still unable to settle into his skin, his asshole damp with something thicker than sweat, clenching like a girl’s cunt when he made her come.

Raylan jerked his traitorous asshole away from Boyd’s thigh. Yanked his feet out of the window, pushed over to his side of the cab so fast that he nearly kicked his best friend in the jaw.

Boyd frowned at him, and Raylan looked away.

There had to be better drugs out there. Expensive, maybe, but worth it if they kept the fucking omega urges at bay. Boyd took enough flak for being friends with a Givens. Raylan couldn’t imagine the backlash if folks found out the Givens was also a male bitch. Boyd would be horrified. Boyd would walk away.

“Are you driving this truck?” Boyd asked, hitting Raylan with a book. When Raylan lifted his head he found Boyd gazing patiently at him, and not sneering with disgust the way Raylan dreamed him up. “Or are we supposed to power the damn thing with our minds?”

“You haven’t got the brains to power a go-kart.”

Boyd laughed loudly at that, frightened the people walking by. Boyd laughed with the same energy he brought to everything else, razor-sharp and brimming with an intensity most people couldn’t take, dynamite with a lit fuse.

Raylan’s lips turned up at the corners, his worries driven away by Boyd’s explosive laughter. It had been five years since he’d presented and nobody the wiser, over six since Boyd Crowder had claimed contrary Raylan Givens as his friend. Boyd hadn’t known about Raylan’s future designation then, and he didn’t know about it now — but maybe he had recognized it lurking in Raylan at thirteen, when he’d slung his arm around Raylan’s neck on the first day of seventh grade and dragged him down the hall. Boyd was firecrackers and dynamite, and Raylan wanted to watch the world burn.

* * *

“You’re not even trying, you asshole.” Raylan holstered his revolver — tucked it in his belt, as close to a holster as they could come — and turned to glare at Boyd, who was still twirling his revolver around his trigger finger like a moron, hollering about robbing wagon trains. “You don’t have time for fancy tricks in a showdown! I’d have shot you dead twice over by now.”

Boyd peered skeptically toward the trees they’d made targets out of, stuffing the barrel of his revolver back into his belt. “You’d have shot _at_ me,” he agreed, squinting at the white paint they’d thrown on two thick tree trunks, Boyd drawing little faces and disproportionately large dicks on their targets. _Man’s got to have big balls, in a showdown_ , he’d said, defending his graffiti from Raylan’s vociferous complaints. “But I wouldn’t be in any danger. You still can’t hit the broad side of a barn.”

They’d been practicing with the revolvers for a week, and Raylan could draw and fire in under three seconds — Boyd had timed him — but his accuracy wasn’t near as good as his time. Though, he had shot right through the balls on both targets. If Raylan was ever in a showdown with a fellow who had testicles the size of melons, it would be a sure win. Boyd, on the other hand, could actually hit the target, but in the time it took him to fire, his opponent would have walked right up and bludgeoned him with his own gun.

“Maybe we’d do better on horseback,” Boyd said, after hurtling through the clearing, howling like a maniac and firing all six rounds without hitting a damn thing. “Like in the movies.”

The closest Raylan had ever come to a horse was chasing a baseball into Mr. Crier’s back pasture, and he suspected that was several acres closer than Boyd had been. Harlan raised hillbilly boys, not Comanche Indians.

“They shoot rifles from horseback in the movies,” Raylan told him. “Revolvers are for shootouts.”

“How the hell do you reload a rifle when you’re on a horse?” Boyd flopped onto his back in the long grass, dappled by the sun setting behind the trees. It was early afternoon still, but they were up against the mountains at one of the Crowders’ old hunting cabins, ringed by peaks and pine trees that shut out the sun.

“How the hell do you do anything on a horse?”

“I suppose you make a fair point,” Boyd conceded, surrendering his revolver when Raylan stuck out his hand. “Maybe we ought to go dove hunting tomorrow. Aim at something we can both shoot.”

“You’re just hungry.”

Though it was true, they were both excellent shots with a hunting rifle. They might be heirs to blue-collar criminals and women with shotguns, but they were Kentucky boys before any of that, and Kentucky boys had been sharpshooters for two hundred years, born with coonskin caps and rifles in their hands. It was a sign that Boyd was still disappointing his daddy and staying out of the family business, if he could aim a rifle better than a gun.

Raylan wondered, sometimes, why Boyd bothered breaking his back in the mines when he could be scheming people out of their money aboveground, or running drugs and earning his daddy’s respect. He wondered if Boyd ever felt penned in by the hills, if he’d chosen the mines to save his paychecks for some dream he’d never shared with Raylan: a city with a bigger library, maybe, real bookstores, a mythical place with universities and classes where Boyd might not be the cleverest one in the room.

 

“You ever want to get out of here?” Raylan asked later, after it grew too dark to shoot, after he had hauled Boyd to his feet and they’d unpacked the biscuits and steak and gravy Raylan’s mama had made, devoured the food and kicked back in the dew-soaked grass behind the cabin with a bottle of cheap bourbon for dessert.

There were more stars littering the sky than Raylan could count, drifts of them scattered like flour across the Givenses’ old kitchen table, Frances letting Raylan sprinkle every inch with white before she rolled out the sugar dough.

Boyd didn’t pretend to misunderstand. “Wouldn’t have this, if I went away,” he answered slowly, gesturing at the glittering wash of the Milky Way and the black curve of the mountains and the mist sweeping over the hills. He dropped his hand to his chest, but Raylan couldn’t tell if he’d meant to include himself along with the mountains and the vastness of space.

“I hear there’s other places with sky,” Raylan told him drily, but his voice was soft. Boyd looked pensive, and sometimes the only way to learn what Boyd was really thinking was to let him off-leash and follow him down false leads and rabbit trails until he’d arrived at his point.

“I know the skies you dream of, Raylan, filled with blimps and rocket ships and neon lights.” Boyd hesitated, glanced at Raylan; snatched at the bottle when Raylan offered it up.

“I wouldn’t mind venturing on a Grand Tour, for a year or two.” He took three long swallows of bourbon, Adam’s apple bobbing, coughing when he surfaced for air. “See something of the world. Fall in love.”

Boyd’s eyes focused on the fraying collar of Raylan’s shirt, gaze dim with sadness. Raylan’s brows drew together. Sadness was rare for Boyd, who always appeared unfettered by past or future regrets.

His expression aside — and that bullshit about love, Boyd wasn’t that dumb — Boyd’s answer made sense. Boyd loved being Boyd, all diamond-hard brilliance, steaming bullshit, and fertilizer bombs. It wasn’t easy being a Crowder in Harlan, but that never seemed to faze Boyd. It made him dig in his heels, determined to stick to Harlan like egg on its face.

Raylan was intimately familiar with the weight of people’s judgment for things that couldn’t be helped — fathers and family names and knots, or lack thereof — but, unlike Boyd, Raylan saw no reason to suffer through it every damn day just so he could prove folks wrong.

“I’ve been thinking about the army,” Boyd announced, in the same slow, meandering tone of voice, and Raylan yelped, “ _What_?” thoroughly ruining his intention to let Boyd talk himself out.

“You can’t join the army.” Raylan stole the bourbon back, because Boyd certainly didn’t need any more alcohol if he was spouting nonsense about joining the army.

Boyd’s brow furrowed, eyes dark as coal and bright as stars. “Raylan.” He drew Raylan’s name out like taffy, the tug of an apron string Raylan should have cut years ago, and never would. “I confess, I am surprised by your antipathy.”

Raylan blew a derisive breath at Boyd’s fool head. Boyd had dropped out after half a season of t-ball when they were five, and he thought he’d survive boot camp? Boyd had nearly failed gym, because he “didn’t appreciate being bossed around by a man whose whistle was larger than his dick.”

“It’s a steady paycheck,” Boyd continued, ignoring Raylan. “It’s aboveground and out of Harlan County, everything that you claim a career needs.” Now that wasn’t true. Raylan had said several times that Boyd should choose a career that would end with a pension and not with him _dead_. “And it’s sort of like being a cowboy,” Boyd concluded, lips tilted in a knowing grin.

Raylan closed his eyes, couldn’t face the invitation in Boyd’s smile. Boyd wasn’t thinking about the army because he wanted to repeat the disaster that t-ball had been; Boyd was thinking about cowboys, about jobs where two white trash boys could make good. He was thinking about how to keep a man out of the mines.

He returned the bottle to Boyd, still scrabbling for a response that wouldn’t crack Boyd’s grin, desperate to say _yes_ to the future Boyd had offered up. Raylan had never been certain, until then, that Boyd had ever considered their friendship lasting longer than a stick of dynamite, a jar of moonshine and lazy summer nights in the bed of Raylan’s truck, shouting down the moon. Oh, he knew that Boyd was willing to disobey his daddy to while away the afternoons with Raylan, but there was a difference between an afternoon and the next four years.

The only person Raylan had ever seen Boyd care enough to plan for was Bowman, part of each paycheck going to his little brother’s future pro-football career. But it wasn’t just Bowman, after all. And, _Christ,_ that made Raylan want to drive them to the recruiting center that night; they could sleep in the parking lot and sign the forms first thing, give notice at the mine and see the world on the government’s dime.

But.

“I can’t join the army.”

Silence thickened around them, a mushroom cloud billowing out of the crater of Raylan’s pronouncement.

Raylan could feel Boyd pull away, then, tuck his arms close to his ribs and his knees up to his chest. It was the first time Raylan could recall that Boyd had ever tried to get _out_ of Raylan’s personal space.

“I want to,” Raylan swore, and it was the God’s honest truth.

Boyd didn’t say a word, and Raylan struggled to find his, because he didn’t usually need them. Boyd was supposed to _know_ all the shit Raylan didn’t say. He was supposed to understand what Raylan couldn’t ever explain.

“I do want to, Boyd. I just can’t.” There was no chance that Raylan could pass the barrage of tests and physicals without someone finding out that Raylan Givens the beta was actually an omega on sups, and omegas weren’t allowed to serve. He’d be outed, then dishonorably discharged for enlisting under false pretenses and sent home to Harlan with his tail between his legs — returned to Harlan _without_ _Boyd_.

“Is it because of your flat feet?” Boyd finally said, voice guarded and body still curled away from Raylan. “Or your heart murmur?”

“It’s actually on account of my crooked spine.” Raylan scooted across the wet grass into Boyd’s space, knocking into his shoulder, throat tightening with relief when Boyd didn’t lean away. “The scoliosis. Doctors say it’s because Mama drank so much whiskey before I was born.”

Boyd offered Raylan the bourbon, and Raylan wrapped his fingers around the neck, over Boyd’s hand. They sat there, shoulders touching, Raylan’s hand clammy where it was curled around Boyd’s, neither of them pulling away.

Raylan thought about how it would be if they were buttoned into uniforms, marching circles in Germany or Japan or Vietnam, constantly on KP duty because the drill sergeant had never trained Boyd to curb his tongue, and Raylan couldn’t very well walk away from a fight. He thought about Boyd planning for their futures, sacrificing his hills because his best friend wanted rocket ships and neon lights.

“Raylan?” Boyd’s voice drew Raylan out of his reverie. “This ain’t related to the clinic, is it? The one up in Lexington, where they knew your name?”

Raylan flinched. And that was all the answer Boyd needed, right there. No point in denying it. Raylan let go of the bottle; let go of Boyd’s hand.

“Boyd, I can’t ...”

He trailed off. There was nothing to say but “I can’t tell you,” and Boyd wouldn’t like to hear that Raylan had a secret he wouldn’t share.

“I ain’t dying,” he promised, instead, Clary Crowder’s shade haunting the Harlan night. “Not unless you fuck up with the Emulex and blow the mine to smithereens.”

“All right,” Boyd said, and tipped the bottle to his lips. “It’s all right, Raylan.”

But Raylan wasn’t stupid enough to believe that, and not just because Boyd wouldn’t meet his eyes.

They finished the bottle that night, slept in the wet grass because they were too drunk to stumble back up the hill to the cabin. Raylan recited the plots from every John Wayne film he could think of till he went hoarse. He’d had to. Someone had to hold the silence at bay, and Boyd — silver-tongued, irrepressible Boyd — kept his gaze fixed on the mountains, and didn’t say another word.

* * *

“Boyd!” Bowman pounded up the stairs, hollering the old family photos off the walls. “Boyd!” He tore into Boyd’s room like it was the Black Bears’ end zone, bounced the door off the wall and slammed it back into the frame.

“G’way,” Boyd muttered, shoving his head underneath a pillow.

Bowman snatched the pillow away and hit Boyd with it, still shouting his big brother’s name.

“Lord Christ _Almighty_ , Bowman, what is it that you want? I’m paying for your goddamn uniforms by working nights, you jackass, so the least you could do is allow me –”

“Your boyfriend called,” Bowman interrupted.

Boyd unglued his eyelids to glare at Bowman, but for once his little brother didn’t seem interested in needling Boyd for his friendship with Raylan. Bowman was still holding Boyd’s pillow like a football, his broad face pale under his fading summer tan.

“Yeah?” Boyd grunted. He sat up and peered blearily at the clothes piled on the floor, hazarding a guess as to which ones didn’t already reek of fire damp or alpha sweat. “I was unaware that Raylan knew how to use the telephone.”

He sniffed at a t-shirt that definitely required laundering, and a pair of jeans that weren’t too rank. Bowman didn’t say anything, which was unusual. Normally Bowman appreciated any opportunity to insult Raylan.

“He still on the line?” Boyd prodded, throwing on a thread-bare shirt with ‘Black Bears 1988’ blazoned across the back, one of the many shirts printed for Evarts’s renowned baseball team. Boyd also possessed one heralding them as 1986 state champions, though that one no longer fit.

“He said to turn on the news.” Bowman shook his head, fingers rubbing nervously along the embroidered edge of the pillowcase. “It’s pretty bad, Boyd.”

That pronouncement was sufficient to hurry Boyd out of the room and down the stairs — not that Bowman thought it was pretty bad, whatever “it” was, but that when Raylan had said to turn on the news, Bowman had obeyed.

The phone was on the kitchen table, cord curled and tangled from the phone to the receiver on the wall. The entire Crowder family was sitting in front of the TV, Boyd’s daddy and his Aunt Betty and Aunt Etta, who wasn’t wearing any make up, hair in curlers like she’d run across the county without getting dressed.

Bowman went straight back to the living room, drawn in by whatever disaster was spiraling out on the television. Boyd lifted the receiver off the kitchen table. He’d expected the buzz of a dial tone, but what he got was a strained silence and the occasional staticky burst of a short, sharp breath.

“Raylan?” he questioned, untwisting the phone cord so he could get closer to the living room to hear whatever the announcer was saying, a perfectly coiffed blonde woman holding a microphone and gesturing behind her at some buildings. “What’s going on?”

Some buildings, and chutes, and an ash pile. She was standing in front of a mine.

“Boyd! Did you see the news?” Raylan’s words tumbled out on top of each other, a five-car pileup on the interstate. “Are you watching?”

‘Wheatcroft, Kentucky,’ the banner at the bottom of the screen said. ‘William Station Mine.’ Boyd had never heard of Wheatcroft or William Station, so whatever the catastrophe was, it had obviously occurred far away from Harlan County.

“They’re saying ten dead,” Raylan continued, didn’t sound like he’d taken a real breath since Boyd had picked up the phone. “Worst it’s been since the Scotia mine in ’76, they said.”

“MSHA, the government organization responsible for mining safety,” the woman told them, as if there was anyone in Kentucky who hadn’t heard of the MSHA, “has yet to issue a formal statement, but local inspectors say that mine had failed to achieve proper ventilation levels for weeks before the –”

“Explosion,” Raylan finished, voice strained and thin, like it wouldn’t squeeze out of his closed throat. “Fire damp. They say that one of the machines must have caught on the stone and sparked.”

Boyd wondered if Raylan was looking out of his window, as they spoke, staring at the tombstones in his yard.

Raylan had always been afraid of the mines; he had admitted as much, when Boyd had asked the year before, and Boyd had been blindsided when Raylan had insisted on joining up in June. But he hadn’t seemed scared of anything, anymore, not after that last baseball game. Raylan hadn’t cared about dying in a fishing explosion gone awry or about leaving Harlan or even about being buried alive. There was nothing but apathy congealing where the fear had been.

Though now it appeared that the bedrock of Raylan’s apathy had fragmented, a coal seam blown to pieces with dynamite. All it had taken was ten men dead on the other side of the state.

 _Are you quitting_? Boyd wanted to ask. _Are you leaving? Packing your bags and fleeing the county tonight?_

They were selfish questions. Selfish, because there was no surer way to make Raylan stay than to ask if he wanted to run. Raylan couldn’t help taking everything as a challenge, even when he could see that it was nothing but Boyd waving a red flag and goading him into a charge.

Instead, Boyd ran his free hand through his hair, tugged it hard and grit his teeth. “Give me ten minutes,” he said, walking back into the kitchen, winding the cord around his wrist. “Let me find a clean pair of socks, and I’ll come pick you up.”

“Boyd –”

“I’ll be right there,” Boyd promised, because he could hear Raylan asking for it with every uneven breath. Raylan had been begging Boyd to come get him ever since he’d dialed the Crowders’ house and demanded that Bowman turn on the news.

“Okay,” Raylan said, and hung up the phone, because apparently his masculinity could handle calling Boyd, but asking him to come over — though he _hadn’t_ , wouldn’t have said a word if Boyd hadn’t insisted on making the drive — was too goddamn much.

Boyd shook his head. There were days that Raylan reminded him of a hound dog pup, the runt of the litter with its tiny milk teeth bared, yipping like it was twice the size of its pudgy littermates and three times as fierce.

“I’m going out,” Boyd shouted toward the living room, heading for the bathroom and some deodorant to cut the fetid smell of his dirty shirt. “I’ll be home tomorrow after work.”

“You ain’t going to work.” Boyd’s daddy growled. Bo heaved himself out of the sunken sofa cushions to glare at Boyd, blocking the path to the front door and Boyd’s work boots on the porch.

Boyd capped the deodorant and lobbed it onto a heap of what might have been clean clothes on the kitchen chair. He shoved his hands in his back pockets, met his daddy’s anger without rising out of his slouch.

Bo Crowder had been the biggest offensive lineman in Harlan, thirty years ago, and he might have lost muscle since then but he’d gained mass, towered over both his boys and the rest of the county. Boyd might have grown up, might be stretching out the shoulders of his shirts from nights in the mines, but he’d never be able to take his daddy in a fight.

It didn’t mean that Boyd wasn’t going to win.

“Daddy,” he said reproachfully, clicking his tongue at his red-faced father. “You ain’t thinking this through.”

“I told you that job was nothing but trouble, son.” Bo’s teeth clicked. “Hell, the Givens boy told you that. You should have listened to him.” Boyd surreptitiously worked his jaw to pop his ears, because he had to be hearing things. It wasn’t possible that his daddy had just told Boyd to heed _Raylan_. “I’m thinking that ten men are dead in western Kentucky, and you’re done with the mines.”

It was the first time since Boyd had refused to break knees for his daddy that Bo had implied he cared if Boyd lived or died. Boyd would have stayed for dinner to capitalize on this newfound well of familial sentiment, but he’d told Raylan ten minutes, and Bo was standing in his way.

“You should have made me quit yesterday, then,” he replied calmly, shrugging off his daddy’s snarl. “If I quit the mines now, ain’t no one in Harlan going to respect the Crowder name ever again.”

Bo’s face went as red as the broken veins in his nose, thick fingers curling into fists, as if laying his son out flat would make him a liar. Boyd was telling the truth, though. Bo’s stature might make him top dog in Harlan, but his serrated alpha teeth wouldn’t save him from the ignominy of having a coward for a son.

“You ain’t going to let him go, Bo!” Aunt Etta cried querulously, aghast at the idea her brother might step aside. “He’ll be killed!”

“Don’t be a stupid cunt,” Bowman hissed, because no one had housetrained Bowman with any success. “Boyd’s right. Coach would kick me off the team, if he quit now. Coach Morgan has two kids in the mines, and one of ‘em’s a cutter on Boyd’s shift.”

“Thank you kindly, little brother,” Boyd drawled, “for your unwavering and wholly self-interested support. Now, while I appreciate everyone’s concern, I’m afraid I must be going, as ‘that Givens boy’ and I have work.”

Bo stepped aside, though he snapped his teeth when Boyd walked past, as if he could clamp them around the scruff of Boyd’s neck and shake all the fight out of his oldest pup. Boyd wished his daddy the best of luck with that endeavor: Boyd had never taken instruction well, but six years at Raylan’s side had made him downright obdurate.

“I’ll see you folks tomorrow morning,” he assured them, snagging a pair of socks off the pile of laundry in the kitchen, shoving his bare feet into his unlaced boots and tromping off the porch.

Not many people in Harlan could face down Bo Crowder and live, but there was no time to glory in that victory, not when Boyd could still hear Raylan’s strangled voice through the hum of the phone.

 

He made it to Raylan’s in five minutes, slowed down when the Givens’ driveway came into sight, a lanky silhouette pacing by the mailbox. Raylan climbed into the truck before Boyd pulled to a stop, slung his cooler into the back. Frances must have shoved it at him before he’d gotten out the door — and Boyd was grateful, because it was his lunch in that cooler, too — since it looked to be the only thing Raylan had remembered to bring.

His trademark cap was missing, hair sleep-mussed and sticking up on the left side. Raylan would have been woken up by his family to watch the news, Helen shouting up the stairs just like Bowman had, and then he would have run straight for the phone to wake Boyd. Raylan didn’t have a belt on, either, his jeans held up by his jutting hipbones, and because he’d forgotten both the keys and wallet that normally weighed them down. At least he’d remembered his boots.

They were about five hours too early for their shift, but hell if Boyd was driving Raylan into town. Everyone there would be aflutter with gossip about the _tragedy_ , about the poor men and their widows, about how many MSHA violations the mines in Harlan had racked up that year.

(Raylan had fumed for a week, last month, when he’d learned that the rest of Kentucky had moved on to newfangled mining that didn’t involve laying dynamite and blowing up the seam, though mining without Emulex sounded to Boyd like a tragedy all its own.)

Drinking was out of the question. Alcohol wouldn’t improve Raylan’s mood, and it certainly wouldn’t make him more amenable to digging coal a thousand feet underground.

Boyd tapped his fingers along the rim of the steering wheel and considered his options. Twilight was pouring into the hollows like mist and night would be quick to follow, but the moon would be up soon and there didn’t look to be any clouds rolling in. And no one recommended shooting at things after dark, but Boyd was working within a very limited set of possibilities, so –

“Let’s go dove hunting,” he declared, turning them up into the hills, glad he’d left his rifles in the rack.

“That’s all you got to say?” Raylan didn’t seem to notice he’d slid to the middle of the bench, his bony knee bumping Boyd’s. “Ten men died in a mineshaft today, so let’s go shoot some birds in the dark?”

“You want me to say we should quit?” Boyd asked harshly, loud in the censorious silence of the cab. “That’s what you’ve been waiting for, ain’t it? An excuse to leave?”

Boyd could still see it, in his mind’s eye, that imminent departure he’d tried not to think about all senior year. One day Raylan would tell off his daddy for the last time, kiss his mama and climb into his truck and drive away. His gaze would be fixed on the horizon and the world beyond Harlan, while Boyd stood in the road, invisible, and watched him go.

Boyd had offered him the army and Raylan had said no. Raylan had secrets he was keeping from Boyd. Whatever it was Raylan wanted that was better than Harlan, it must be better than Boyd, too.

“I never asked you to dig coal,” Boyd said, exhaustion crashing into him, a train with no brakes. “Quit whenever you want.”

“Fuck you.” Raylan’s eyes lit up, fire damp and a fatal spark. “ _Fuck_ _you_ , Boyd.” He lashed out at Boyd, slammed him into the far door and might have sent them off the road if Boyd hadn’t hit the brakes when he’d laid into Raylan. “That’s what you think? The hell do you think I’m still doing in the mines, then, when I earned twice what it would cost to drive clear to Vegas in the first month? You self-centered –”

Boyd ricocheted off the door and let the momentum throw him towards Raylan. He lifted a hand to do _something_ , to punch Raylan, or shake him, or anything to shut his mouth.

Then he lost his goddamn mind, curled his hand around Raylan’s neck, and smashed their lips together in a kiss.

The back of Raylan’s head thudded against the rear window, his indignant cry muffled by Boyd’s mouth. He put one hand in Boyd’s hair and pulled hard, shoved him into the edge of the steering wheel and immediately followed, knocking their noses together before crashing his lips and teeth against Boyd’s.

Boyd jammed his tongue into Raylan’s mouth and Raylan bit down till it throbbed, then soothed the bite with his own tongue. Boyd tasted blood in their mouths, assumed it was his until his teeth caught Raylan’s bottom lip. But then Raylan whimpered, licked across Boyd’s teeth, and Boyd realized his incisors had dropped, sharp alpha teeth laying claim to Raylan’s torn lips and tongue.

Boyd had never lost himself, in the girls. Had never gotten hard so fast, his cock pushing into the zipper of his jeans, blood pounding in his knot. Boyd had never wanted a girl like he’d wanted Raylan, not once in four impossibly long years.

“Christ,” he muttered into Raylan’s open mouth, winding his tongue around Raylan’s. “You have no fucking idea, Raylan. None at all. I have wanted –”

Raylan laughed, soft pants against Boyd’s numb lips. “Boyd,” he breathed, amused. “Anyone ever tell you that you talk too much?”

He manhandled Boyd around the steering wheel, pushing him down so that Boyd was on his back in the cab with Raylan above him. “Now shut up,” he commanded, and ground his erection down against Boyd’s.

“Raylan,” Boyd gasped. He wrapped his hands around Raylan’s thin hips, pinning him in place, their cocks pressed together through their jeans. He licked a path along the smooth line of Raylan’s jaw. Raylan arched his head back, exposing his neck, and Boyd moaned. “You feel so good. God, knew you’d feel so good.”

They weren’t going to last. Boyd’s whole body was throbbing in time with his cock, his skin so sensitive that when Raylan’s fingers scratched his scalp Boyd shivered all the way down his spine.

Raylan was whining low in his throat with every press of their hips, rutting against Boyd with urgent, shallow thrusts that meant he was about to come. Boyd had watched him through the rear window for years, had seen Raylan’s eyes screwed shut, his dick sliding into the pink folds of a cunt, close enough to hear him gasp out his orgasm but never close enough to touch.

“Come on, Raylan,” he panted, dragging his hands up the muscles of Raylan’s back. “Come for me, baby, come on.”

Raylan groaned, and this time there was no girl to drown out the sound, no window between them. The sweat that dripped off Raylan’s face landed on Boyd’s. Boyd could catch Raylan’s breath in his mouth, and Raylan’s eyes — well, those had been focused on Boyd all along.

“Come for me, Raylan.”

“Boyd. _Boyd_.” Raylan groaned, arched his spine and threw his head back, his hips jerking forward into Boyd’s. Boyd could feel all Raylan’s muscles lock up tight.

Boyd knew every nuance of Raylan’s face during sex, every shudder and open-mouthed gasp. But this was different. This was Raylan in his arms, Raylan collapsing onto Boyd’s chest. It was Raylan’s bloodied lips breathing Boyd’s name into his skin, and the sheer, miraculous impossibility of it sent Boyd flying straight over the edge.

“- fucking incredible, Raylan. Raylan. Raylan.” When Boyd came back to himself, he was mumbling praise into Raylan’s cheek, pressing his lips in aimless, rooting kisses over Raylan’s sweaty skin.

Raylan huffed, the one eye Boyd could see sparkling with laughter. “Boyd Boyd Boyd,” he retorted mockingly, but Boyd could feel the smile curling against his cheek.

“ _Raylan_ ,” Boyd repeated firmly, and Raylan stuck his tongue in Boyd’s ear. “Your eyes are doves. Your teeth are like a flock of sheep. Your fruit is sweet to my taste.”

Raylan lifted his head, lips swollen, mouth pink where Boyd’s stubble had scraped against his skin. “Doves?” he echoed incredulously. “ _Sheep_? What am I, jackass, a barnyard?”

“Raised in one, I suspect.”

Boyd lifted his head to reach Raylan’s lips, unable to help his surprised inhale when Raylan deepened the kiss instead of backing away. Four years of being certain that Raylan wouldn’t want this — that he’d never even consider it, that if Boyd fucked up and gave it away Raylan would break all his ribs, wouldn’t stop running until he’d crossed the state line — and here Raylan was in his arms, not panicking at all.

“What else am I supposed to think?” Boyd managed, sucking the words in a line of bruises under Raylan’s chin and back up to his open mouth. “When you ridicule God’s sacred words.”

“Sacred words about _farm animals_ ,” Raylan muttered, grinning against Boyd’s teeth.

“Fine.” Boyd twisted to lick at the hinge in Raylan’s jaw. “You are sweet to the taste, though,” he breathed, pressing his nose behind Raylan’s ear, desperate to set his tongue and teeth to every inch of Raylan’s skin. “And you smell divine.” It wasn’t really smell, Boyd supposed. Scenting was the taste of pheromones in the air, the dance of them along the skin, all the senses caught up and lured in. Whatever it was, Raylan smelled delectable, a bewitching perfume that made Boyd wish he could sink into Raylan’s skin. “It’s far better than that sulfuric aftershave your aunt bought you last year." Which might have been the wrong thing to say.

“Raylan?” he asked, hesitant, because Raylan was pulling away, jabbing Boyd with elbows and knees where a moment before he’d been a languid pile of boneless limbs squashing Boyd into the seat. “If this is about your aftershave ...”

But it wasn’t. Whatever it was had frightened Raylan, his eyes wide, white shining around his irises in the dark.

“I have to go.” He scrambled off of Boyd, backed into the passenger door and groped frantically behind him for the handle, desperate to escape.

“Raylan –”

Boyd’s voice caught in his throat, watching Raylan’s scrabbling fingers and the panic on his kiss-bruised face. He’d hoped, when Raylan had laughed after, when he had kissed Boyd instead of spitting and turning away — he’d hoped that Raylan would stay. Boyd should have known better. Raylan’s revulsion wasn’t absent, but merely delayed.

“I have to go!” Raylan got the door open, fell backwards onto the dirt road and lurched onto his feet. Took off, stumbling into the dark.

By the time Boyd forced his limbs to move, folded his shaking fingers around the door handle and tumbled out of the truck — by the time he could follow, Raylan was running headlong into the night, his gaze fixed on the horizon while Boyd stood, invisible, and watched him leave.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those of you interested in Kentucky mining history, the explosion in Wheatcroft, Kentucky, September 1989 was a very real and tragic thing, and there are several articles if you Google it.


	8. Chapter 8

When Boyd got to work a few hours later, Raylan’s truck was in the parking lot.

'Course Givens was here. Where else would he be? Raylan had gone down in the first car with Briggs, Ronnie said, answering the question Boyd couldn’t bring himself to ask.

He had stood in the doorway to the locker room, wondering if Raylan’s locker would be empty, if once Raylan started running he wouldn’t stop until Harlan was nothing but an ugly memory, the people in it a blight upon this scarred earth.

Ronnie was quiet, in the elevator. Subdued. The whole crew was quiet that night, thinking of Wheatcroft and the William Station mine and ten men dead. They flinched whenever the roof popped and winced again when it settled, everyone backing to the far end of the room when Boyd came up out of the cut shouting “Fire in the hole!”

Everyone but Raylan, who sidled closer than he’d ever been while Boyd was holding a detonator in his hands. It was nice to know that even if Raylan was never going to speak to Boyd again, he would still stand beside him on a night when everyone else was too scared of dying to hold their ground — Raylan, who was terrified of being buried in Harlan’s coal-black dirt.

It was too loud to talk in the tunnels, not unless Boyd wanted to shout everything to the crew and get them both lynched as faggots. It didn’t stop him from trying to start a conversation — any conversation, any sign that their friendship might survive this latest blow — but Raylan ignored him. He pretended that he couldn’t hear Boyd’s hollering, jumped away when Boyd pressed a hand to his sleeve.

On a different night, the crew would have noticed something amiss with the “twin pups” of the shift. (“Laverne and Shirley,” the foreman had named them. “Baker and Ponch” was Ronnie’s favorite, but it had reached the point where even Raylan responded to “Archie and Edith” or “Hoss and Little Joe.” Alf had referred to them as “the Bo and Luke Duke of Harlan” once; but only once, since Raylan hadn’t taken kindly to either of them being called ‘Bo’.) But no one wanted to talk that night, and everyone was jumpy, so neither Raylan’s jerky retreats nor Boyd’s worried frown seemed out of place.

Of course, Raylan probably regretted standing in solidarity with Boyd the next night, since it meant they were first into the fresh cut, and the only ones that far into the seam when the roof caved in.

The world went black.

Boyd couldn’t see his hands, everything coated in darkness thick as pitch. He _could_ feel the new wall of stone shards and coal a foot in front of his face, though none of that mattered when he couldn’t find Raylan.

“Raylan!” he screamed, feeling frantically along the wall, dread rising like bile in his throat.

His voice reverberated through the darkness, dislodging something farther down the tunnel with a sharp crack. He lowered his voice, trying not to bring the rest of the ceiling down, and felt blindly around for Raylan’s head, or his legs, or any sign that he was next to Boyd and not buried under a solid ton of rock.

“Raylan!”

The smell of sewage worsened, as if Boyd had blown up an underground port-a-john and its effluence was cascading down the seam. The smell of shit in the air meant fire damp, and plenty of it. Methane gas that had blown ten men into their graves not two days past.

The putrid odor sobered Boyd, made him slow down and think instead of groping in the dark for Raylan. He had a headlamp. He could check the methane levels with the detector on his belt, and he could find Raylan. If Raylan was unconscious, Boyd would jam a respirator in the boy’s mouth, because hell if he was letting Raylan die in the mines.

Once Boyd flipped on his light, it grew easier to breathe. The methane levels weren’t as bad as Boyd had expected, and Raylan wasn’t unconscious, though he looked like he ought to be.

Raylan was huddled against the far wall, panting too quickly to take in any air. His hardhat had fallen off, and when Boyd’s lamp caught Raylan’s face, he could see the whites all around his eyes, terrified as a steer dragged onto the butcher’s truck.

The first glimpse of Raylan’s ashen face put Boyd on his knees, gasping in relief.

“ _Raylan_ ,” he cried softly. “Thank the Lord.”

He crawled across the coal and rock debris scattered around them until he was next to Raylan. It felt safer, once both of them were up against the wall, Raylan’s bent legs digging into Boyd’s side, Boyd’s hands on Raylan’s sooty face.

“You’ve got to breathe, Raylan,” he insisted, tilting Raylan’s head until his wild eyes locked on Boyd’s. “We have air. We’re not dead. You just need to breathe.”

The words seemed to have some effect, Raylan struggling to inhale instead of choking on the air like a fish. “Boyd,” he mouthed, without force or sound, but Boyd could hear it all the same.

Raylan might not have wanted Boyd to touch him, and under other circumstances — aboveground, where there was light and oxygen and life instead of darkness and cold stone — Boyd might have stayed away. But Boyd couldn’t keep his distance from Raylan’s slack, petrified face, his panicked eyes and the curve of his lips around Boyd’s name.

He curled around Raylan, shielding him as best Boyd could from the tenebrous space around them, from the slabs of rock hanging like swords over their heads. Raylan folded willingly into Boyd’s chest, smaller than he’d ever been.

“You have me,” Boyd promised. “I’m here. You’re all right, Raylan. It’s all right.” Though Raylan might not have believed that last one, since he was close enough to feel Boyd’s heart racing in his chest.

Boyd hadn’t quite caught his breath, still reliving those endless moments where he’d been alone in the dark, certain that he’d never hear Raylan’s fractious voice ever again.

“Boys?” The sound was faint, coming through the rock pile separating them from the main room and the rest of the crew, but it was there. “Crowder! Givens!”

“We’re here!” Boyd shouted, and Raylan flinched. “We’re all right!”

“Motherfucking hallelujah,” somebody said loudly. “Can you breathe?”

“How the fuck else would he be talking, Ronnie? You think he’s shouting out of his ass?”

“Could be. It’s Boyd Crowder, ain’t it?”

“Everybody shut the fuck up!” Briggs hollered, and Boyd could hear the foreman’s voice as clear as trumpets on the last day. “Boys, we’ll have you out in a jiffy. Just stay put.”

“And here I had planned to start breakdancing,” Boyd muttered, and it was proof of how deep Raylan had fled into his panic that he didn’t make any comments about Boyd bringing down the house. Though Boyd hadn’t really required the additional proof. Raylan’s long fingers grasping at his coveralls — and he hadn’t done that since the first trip down the shaft — and the head burrowed into Boyd’s shoulder was more than enough evidence that Raylan wasn’t all right.

“It’s fucking dark,” Raylan whispered into Boyd’s neck, teeth chattering. Of course it was fucking dark. Boyd’s headlamp wasn’t doing any goddamn good with his head pressed to Raylan’s, facing the wall.

“My apologies, Raylan.” He tugged the headlamp off his hat and set it on the floor. “Is there anything else I can do to make your stay here at the Myrtle Creek Luxury Inn more palatable?” he asked, adopting the supercilious accent of a TV maître d’. “Some fresh linens, perhaps? A well-cooked steak?”

“Have you been snorting coal dust again?” Raylan retorted shakily, and Boyd buried his face against the side of Raylan’s head and grinned, lips catching on the shell of Raylan’s ear.

That was the most Raylan had said to Boyd in two days, beyond “Briggs said to get out of the bolters’ way” or “Mama packed you some fried chicken and a slice of pie.” It was the first indication that Raylan didn’t despise them both for what they’d done in the cab of Boyd’s truck, breathless and sweaty and Raylan’s scent –

Sort of like it was now, actually, only now it included the sour aftertaste of fear and the overwhelming reek of coal dust and fire damp.

Boyd inhaled through his mouth.

Shook his head, sharply, because it was impossible, Raylan’s scent. He stuck out his tongue and licked at the sweat cooling on Raylan’s neck, tasted something that couldn’t be right, and so tried it again.

It was _impossible_.

Boyd would have assumed he was hallucinating, that maybe he should have put in his respirator because he was high on fumes — but Raylan stiffened where he was curled against Boyd. He yanked his head backwards and gazed at Boyd, scared as he had been minutes ago when he’d thought they’d been buried in a miner’s grave.

Impossible or not, Raylan’s expression meant that it was true.

“You’re an _omega_?”

Boyd couldn’t stop lapping at the fetid air around them, darting his tongue out like a snake. Raylan’s face looked like it always had, in the weak yellow light of Boyd’s headlamp, only wan and streaked with black. There was nothing there to indicate how Boyd could have missed something this vital, how he could have been blind to something so fundamental, not when he’d always known Raylan better than Raylan knew himself.

“Boyd,” Raylan rasped. He shifted in Boyd’s arms like he might scramble away and run, same as he had two nights before.

Then a slab broke off the ceiling farther down the cut, the whole floor vibrating under the crashing impact of tons of stone. Raylan’s hands clamped vise-tight around the loose material of Boyd’s coveralls, and he didn’t move.

“But there’s no such thing as a male omega,” Boyd protested. And wasn’t that a stupid thing to say when there was one shivering, tangible, less than a foot away?

“Only on TV,” Raylan replied, eyes wide and chary, but his lips tilted in the faintest outline of a smile. It sounded like something he’d said before, or planned to say; a rehearsal, maybe, for all the times he’d never confessed this to Boyd. And suddenly everything started to make sense, years of mysteries slotting into place.

“You always turn down alpha girls,” Boyd murmured. “I thought it was –”

Well, most days Boyd assumed it was Raylan’s knotheaded male posturing, never mind that Raylan was a beta (or he had been, or Boyd _thought_ he had). He’d assumed that Raylan didn’t want a girl that could even potentially claim him, if he was so willing to turn down an alpha’s tight pussy. Though sometimes — when Raylan had looked at Boyd through the window, thrust into that night’s cunt and come — Boyd thought he must have sensed that it would kill Boyd to see any other alpha with their hands on Raylan.

“Thought they might figure it out.” Raylan shrugged. “That they’d smell the difference.” He looked away. “You did.”

Boyd had been less than three feet and a windshield away every time Raylan had gotten laid for _four years_ , and hadn’t figured it out. Though he might have, that last night, if Raylan hadn’t run away.

“Suppressants,” Boyd said slowly, thinking of a truck full of omega whores and a perfect day. “That’s why that doctor recognized you, up at the clinic. Why you can’t join the army. You’re not sick.”

And finally, _finally_ , he could believe it. Raylan had promised repeatedly that he wasn’t sick or dying or otherwise likely to end up under the black soil of his front yard, but all Boyd could see was cold, gray marble, _Raylan Givens, 1970-1989_ , and no one left to save Boyd from his grief with the promise of outlawry and free moon pies.

“Not unless being an omega counts,” Raylan confirmed. Then he inhaled sharply, blinking in surprise, as if he could see the word painted in the inky air. Boyd wondered if Raylan had ever said it aloud before. _Omega_. More likely, Raylan had let the doctors read it out of his file and left everyone else in the dark. If nobody ever said it, then he didn’t have to know that it was true.

“Why can I scent you, then?”

Boyd nosed at his dusty hair, tempted to lick again at Raylan’s dirty neck. He refrained. Boyd might be a deviant, but he wasn’t stupid: Raylan might be an omega, but it didn’t mean he wouldn’t knock out Boyd’s front teeth for taking liberties at a bad time.

“Aren’t you on suppressants? Don’t they work?”

“They did,” Raylan informed him, wedging a hand between Boyd’s nose and his neck and pushing Boyd’s face away. “Or I’d have been run out of town years ago as a freak. But since I just about shit my pants when the roof _fell on our heads_ , the sups may have stopped working right along with my heart, lungs, and sphincter!”

“All right, Chicken Little,” Boyd said soothingly, and Raylan pinched Boyd’s nose. “I suppose you might be correct.” He paused to dislodge Raylan’s fingers from his face, then blurted out what he’d been thinking all along.

“You could have told me.”

 _You_ should _have told me. If I’d known how it was, we could have –_

“Sure,” Raylan snorted, shifting away. “‘Oh, by the way Boyd, you remember how you said male omegas were only on sitcoms, and how Coach Morgan told us in Health class that they didn’t exist? Well, surprise! Now what was that you were saying about the third quarter of the Steelers’ game?’” His mouth twisted ruefully, and he swung a hand through the dim shaft of light and into the darkness encasing them like rock. “You’d be running for the hills, once I told you. You’d be running for the hills _now_ , if we weren’t trapped underneath one instead.”

“I'd thank you to recall that I spent four years listening to assholes in high school call me your bitch, and I didn’t go anywhere.” Boyd growled, had to take a deep breath and count to ten to keep from dropping his teeth, driven feral by Raylan’s bullheaded idiocy. “I stuck my tongue down your throat and made myself a queer and _you_ ran, Raylan. Not me.”

“Boys?”

Briggs’s shout cut off whatever Raylan might have said – or the punch he might have thrown. Raylan had never appreciated being called a coward, whether or not it was true.

“We’re making a hole for you now. Get back a ways, in case the shovel knocks anything loose.”

They edged farther into the tunnel, Boyd snatching up his headlamp and bumping into Raylan’s hardhat as he scooted backwards. He shoved it on Raylan’s hard head, then wrapped his arm around Raylan’s chest and pulled, since the idiot didn’t seem inclined to move on his own.

He kept his arm there because being near Raylan felt like standing a foot away from a lightning strike, all his hair standing on end, the taste of ozone and fire in the air.

“Shit.” Boyd sniffed once more to make certain, cursed, then started stripping out of his clothes. “Boy, you need to get out of those clothes.”

“What the hell?” Raylan slapped Boyd’s hand away from the zipper on his coveralls. “Boyd, what the fuck are you doing?”

“You smell like an omega,” Boyd explained, untying his boots. An electric shovel started up on the other side of the rock pile, and he hurried to pry his shoes off without loosening the laces.

When he glanced up at Raylan, expecting him to understand the urgency of the situation, he found Raylan pressed tightly against the cut, his arms curled protectively around his chest. He was staring at Boyd like other kids sometimes stared at Raylan, the moment they realized that he wouldn’t stop after the first punch.

“What?” Boyd demanded, exasperated. “You do!”

“And so you want me to strip for you?” Raylan snapped, horror warring with indignation in his voice. “What, so I’m easier to rape?”

“So that you can put on my goddamn clothes,” Boyd replied, his voice measured, acid in his tone. “Unless you want the whole crew to sniff out your secret, soon as we’re free?”

He ripped his socks off and threw them at Raylan’s head. Changing socks probably wouldn’t do anything for Raylan’s scent, but flinging his dirty socks at Raylan’s pursed mouth made Boyd feel a little better all the same.

“But then, you probably expected me to tell them,” he added viciously, wriggling out of his coveralls and his boxers at the same time. “Right after I finished _raping_ you.”

“No.” Raylan was finally moving, pulling off his boots and undoing his coveralls, stripping out of his shirt. He worked his jaw back and forth, flattened his lips and stared at Boyd. “I didn’t think you’d tell them.” He put on Boyd’s socks, and handed over his own with an apologetic air. “I know you wouldn’t do that, Boyd.”

Raylan hung his head, and Boyd knew that they were no longer talking about the possibility of Boyd telling the crew. In case Boyd had any reservations as to his veracity, Raylan then stripped out of his underwear. He met Boyd's gaze, crouched naked for a moment in the dim light of Boyd's headlamp, a show of trust before sliding into Boyd's clothes. Raylan never had believed in talk, only in the actions that proved it true.

“All right,” Boyd forgave him, and wriggled into Raylan’s coveralls as fast as he could.

He had reason to hurry. There was light coming in through cracks in the rocks, now; and besides that, Raylan was trusting Boyd, and it wouldn’t do for him to see Boyd get hard from slipping into Raylan’s sweat-stained undershirt, the cheap cotton of Raylan’s underwear brushing his dick and Raylan’s scent all around him. Boyd stuck his hat on Raylan’s head and laid flat to roll around on the coal shards and debris on the floor, hoping that coal and methane and his alpha scent would be enough to mask the unmistakable tang of omega in the stale air.

“Boyd,” Raylan hissed, and then the crew knocked through the rocks.

Briggs stuck his head through the hole, face coated with coal and eyes tight with concern. “Can you two scrawny fuckers fit through here? I’ll widen the hole, if we have to, but I’d rather get your thick skulls safe and sound on this side before we move any more rocks.”

“We’ll fit,” Raylan assured him.

“You’re going first,” Boyd said, eyeing the narrow gap between the wall and the boulders trapping them in the seam.

“You’re skinnier than I am,” Raylan protested, as if Boyd couldn’t see him peering longingly at the hole and the light beyond.

“And that’s why you’re going first.” Boyd emphasized his answer with a glib slap to Raylan’s back. “Once you’ve squeezed all those rocks out of the way, I’ll fit through just fine.”

Raylan gave him a look, in the gloom of their lamps, that suggested he was not persuaded by Boyd’s logic, but he rolled his eyes and crawled over to take Briggs's hand and climb through the crack.

Boyd certainly wasn’t going to squeeze through first and leave Raylan on the far side of a cave in. Not when he could still feel the marrow frozen in his bones, from when he had called out and no one had answered, trapped in the dark and wondering if Raylan was alive.

Boyd skinned his palms coming through the hole, eager to land back in a room with ventilation and a bolted ceiling and five feet of clearance and a whole string of lights. Alf helped him up and pounded him on the back, same as Ronnie was doing to Raylan.

“Jesus Christ, you both stink,” Briggs declared, waving a hand in front of his face. Raylan spun around, and he and Boyd stared at each other in shared consternation before looking at Briggs.

“Yeah?” Boyd said, sounding tremulous to his own ears.

“Oh yeah,” the foreman chuckled, clapping Boyd on the shoulder with a paternal smile Boyd had never once seen on Bo. “Worse than the barn at a dairy farm.”

“Worse than a port-a-john in the sun!” one of the roof bolters threw in, followed by a chorus of other off-color suggestions as to just how badly they smelled.

Boyd joined in the laughter, and if his laughter verged on hysterics no one said a word. He was entitled to a bout of hysterical relief, even if the crew didn’t realize just how much Boyd had to be relieved about.

“You two get out of here,” Briggs told them, cutting Raylan off with a dismissive gesture when he moved to protest. “You’ll get paid, Laverne, don’t worry. Shift’s over in an hour anyway, and Boyd’ll have to fill out a report about how his Emulex broke the tunnel.”

“Now, wait one second,” Boyd said, piqued. “You ain’t gonna blame this on me.”

“I ain’t blaming it on anybody,” Briggs reassured him, tapping his knuckles along Raylan's hat to check for cracks. “As long as you two get in that car up the tunnel and I don’t see your ugly mugs until the weekend’s done.”

“Yes, sir,” Boyd agreed, saluting, and dragged Raylan toward the coal cars before he insisted that they work the rest of their shift.

Two days without speaking — two days where Raylan had stood too far away to listen to Boyd’s standard musings on where the coal seam ended, what books were buried in the library that he hadn’t read, or any other subject that came to mind — and Boyd couldn’t think of a damn thing to say, quiet as they trundled up the tunnels and out of the shaft.

Raylan was an _omega_. Everything Boyd had known about the world, everything that he’d come to terms with about himself and his sentiments towards his best friend; it had all been smashed to pieces when the roof fell in.

They got back aboveground and Raylan headed straight for the parking lot. “Wait!” Boyd shouted, jogging after him. “Where are you going?” They couldn’t leave yet. Boyd still had to go to the office and check in, and they desperately needed showers before they decided whose truck to take and where they were going to go.

Raylan twisted to look at Boyd, but he didn’t slow down. “Home,” he said, eyebrows raised like it should have been obvious. “Where I usually go after a shift.” Though _usually_ Boyd dropped him off on the way back to his place, or Raylan took the long route past the Crowders’ after work if they’d driven his truck.

“But I still have to report to the office.” Boyd pulled his hat — Raylan’s hat — off, and ran a hand through his hair. “You’re gonna wait in the truck?”

Raylan’s jaw tightened. “You drove your own truck in,” he said flatly. “You don’t need me to drive you home.”

Boyd shook his head, disbelieving. “You can’t ignore this, Raylan,” he told him, though that might not be entirely true. As it was, Raylan had successfully ignored everything for two full days. “You’re just going to run away again?”

“I’m not running away!” Raylan spat, his cheeks reddening under the streaks of coal. “I’m tired and I’m going home to bed, because it is stressful having a mountain blown onto your head!”

“Fine.” Boyd bared his teeth, took a step backwards and forced his shoulders down, his obvious tension probably spoiling the nonchalant shrug he’d aimed to convey. “If you’re not running away, then you’ll be home this afternoon when I come by, since that’s what we _usually_ do.”

“Fine,” Raylan echoed, though he cut his gaze to the right like he did during poker games, when he wanted to fold but was in too deep to consider backing down. Occasionally, Raylan’s overweening pride worked to Boyd’s advantage, an instrument with all its strings pulled taut, easy to play.

“I’ll see you this afternoon, Raylan!” Boyd called out, grinning at Raylan’s hunched shoulders as his friend spun away and stomped towards his truck.

Boyd’s smile softened, and he shook his head. Raylan had his daddy’s temper, though no one would dare tell him so. If he’d been an alpha he’d be worse than Bowman at keeping his teeth in. He was already quicker with his fists, the surliest beta in eastern Kentucky.

Only it turned out that wasn’t true. Nobody knew Raylan better than Boyd; and apparently Boyd didn’t know him at all.

Boyd inhaled, tracked the breath down the knotted muscles in his neck and out his clenched hands. Then he headed for the office to write his report. The sooner he finished up at the mine, the sooner he could go home and wait for the clock to strike noon. All bets were off, after noon — Raylan hadn’t folded, and Boyd was determined to see every damn card that boy had been keeping up his sleeve.

* * *

Boyd’s truck had a faulty muffler. If he ever chose to please his daddy and turn to crime, the racket it made would give the whole county time to board up their windows and load their guns. As it stood, the muffler alerted the Givens household to Boyd’s arrival from about a mile away.

“I told you that boy ain’t welcome here,” Arlo bellowed from the front room, on hold with the government office in charge of disabled veterans’ pensions, claiming some surname that wasn’t his. “Good-for-nothing pup’s a disappointment to his daddy.”

Arlo leaned backwards in his chair, peering through the doorway to the kitchen where Raylan was picking at his breakfast. “Guess he learned that from you, son,” he said, nasty smile stretched across his yellowed alpha teeth.

Raylan pretended not to hear. “Going out!” he hollered through the back door where his mama was outside pinning a load of wet sheets to the clothesline, and dumped his untouched plate in the sink, peered out the kitchen window and hesitated for a breath.

He didn’t want to answer Boyd’s questions. In Harlan, people were reflections of what everybody knew, their circumstances and their upbringing and their kin. Boyd was an alpha, but barely, because everyone _knew_ it was his contentious beta friend who picked the fights and called the shots. Everyone knew it was Raylan, who’d insisted they work in the mines and not for their daddies. (No one in Harlan had read Raylan’s essay on all the ways Boyd Crowder was a moron, or maybe they’d have thought twice about the mines.)

Of course, Boyd was also a Crowder, and so everyone knew it was only a matter of time before he turned: every Crowder was rotten at the core.

And Raylan was a Givens, broke Dickie’s knee because it was in his blood to hate a Bennett, learned the trade on the wrong end of his daddy’s fists. Everyone _knew_ Raylan was a stuck-up beta who thought he was too good for Kentucky, put his nose in the air like he wouldn’t end up swinging a bat for the Crowders someday, same as his old man. (Nobody else had heard Dickie running his mouth, that last game. Nobody knew that Raylan had already broken a man's knee for the Crowder boy. Not even Boyd knew that.)

And it didn’t matter that most of it was pure fictitious bullshit, as Boyd would say. The people of Harlan were certain of their facts — certain that Raylan was a beta who sharpened his teeth on whetstones, scarred his fists because he couldn’t grow a knot — and so it had to be the gospel truth.

In Harlan County, Raylan Givens was a beta. He’d never been anything else. He didn’t know how to be the omega that Boyd would be looking for, that afternoon, how to be the reflection of some stranger conjured up in Boyd’s eyes.

So no, Raylan didn’t want to face Boyd, but when the choice came down to Boyd idling in the drive and Arlo spitting poison in the front room, Raylan gladly grabbed his jacket and cap and barreled out the front door without pausing to kiss his mama goodbye.

“You’re awful eager,” Boyd noted, once Raylan slid into the cab and slammed the door hard enough to rock the truck.

“Arlo’s home,” Raylan explained. That was adequate reason for anyone to leave at a run, and Boyd made a soft, comprehending noise. “So _drive_ , asshole.”

Boyd obeyed, and Raylan busied himself searching the cab for alcohol, bending to check under the seat where he could hide from Boyd’s piercing gaze.

“Are we stopping for beer? You ain’t got nothing here to drink.”

“Jesus Christ, you’re a fussy bitch,” Boyd retorted, tossed out the old insult by rote.

Then he caught wind of what he’d said and froze, all the air in the truck spun thin as a piece of antique glass.

 _Bitch_.

Boyd had called Raylan that for years, light and teasing, the perfect insult for a contumacious beta boy that acted like an alpha dog. And it was incidences such as this one that had Raylan reluctant to meet with Boyd this afternoon, because Boyd would look at Raylan and see an omega, would rewrite everything they’d been.

“And you’re a niggardly cunt.” Raylan responded the way he always did. He continued digging under the seat for a bottle that wasn’t there, pretending that every muscle wasn’t tuned to the body next to his.

Boyd exhaled. Then he returned to playing the drums against the steering wheel, and Raylan relaxed.

“I want food, too, if we’re stopping. You owe me, for burying me in a rockslide.”

“I didn’t make the roof fall in!” Boyd huffed, slapping the dashboard near Raylan’s head. “Alf called, says Briggs had them inspect the site. They think it might have been some bad cuts, or that we hadn’t shored up the ceiling at the edge of the room.”

“And I’m sure that they phoned all this in to MSHA,” Raylan said cynically, sitting up and arching an eyebrow. Boyd’s face closed up, and Raylan nodded, unsurprised. “Yeah, that’s what I thought.”

That mine in Wheatcroft had racked up a host of safety violations, courtesy of MSHA, but writing violations hadn’t saved those ten dead men.

“I have a craving for hamburgers,” he declared, changing the subject. Unless he wanted to call his Uncle Silas to come and start another picket line, there was no point in listing all the company’s crimes.

“Now, Raylan. Last time we went for hamburgers, you ate five. I’m just an underpaid powder man. I can’t afford your cravings.”

Despite that, Boyd drove them to McDonald’s and counted out the money for Raylan’s bags of food, though he did make Raylan pay for the case of beer they bought off Earl Ray. Raylan made it through two orders of french fries by the time Boyd jostled and jounced them into the mountains and up to their field, leaves crunching under the tires and blowing in the open windows, crisp and red as an autumn sunset in the hills.

For a little while Boyd seemed content with his fast food and his tepid beer, both of them sitting on the hood of the truck, the engine’s fading heat soaking into the seats of their jeans. “That cloud looks like the unholy progeny of a horse and an alligator,” he’d mutter occasionally, gesturing at the sky with ketchup-laden chicken nugget; or, “See that one? I bet that’s Coyote holding a bomb, waiting for the roadrunner to pass by.”

“You do recall that Coyote only blows up himself, don’t you?” Raylan reminded him, stealing the chicken nugget Boyd was using as a pointer and popping it into his mouth. “Kind of like you did last night.”

“For the last goddamn time,” Boyd began, incensed. Boyd had never been easy to goad, before this, and it made Raylan’s triumph all the sweeter.

Raylan rolled off the truck, laughing at Boyd’s disgruntled scowl. He picked himself back up to find Boyd polishing off the last of his french fries with a satisfied smirk.

After they’d finished wolfing down their food, though, and were sipping slowly at their beers, Boyd went still, and Boyd sitting still never portended anything Raylan would be pleased to hear. He had that look on his face, the one that meant they were going to buckle down and finish their homework before the bell rang. It wasn’t so dissimilar to his expression coming out of the guidance counselor’s office that last time, when he’d decided that his future career opportunities included blowing up Ms. Tipton's desk and sending her back to Louisville where she belonged.

“We should do something tonight,” Raylan blurted out, cutting Boyd's interrogations off before they could begin. He laid his words down like sand bags, one man trying to prevent a flood. “We ain’t gone anywhere in a while. Could drive up to Lexington, maybe.”

The wind blew harder down the mountains, in the fall, sliced through the branches of the trees and cut, stinging and cold, through the thin fabric of Raylan’s jacket. It ran chilled fingers through Boyd’s dark hair, whipped dark strands over the lines creasing his forehead.

“Raylan,” Boyd said, inexorable as winter creeping over the ridge.

“What?” he snapped, launching himself off the hood and onto his feet. He was taller than Boyd, on his feet, could get some distance from those dark eyes. “What the hell else is there to say? Yes, I’m an omega. No, this ain’t new. It never mattered before –”

“I never knew about it before,” Boyd objected, but Raylan ignored him.

“- so I can’t see why it ought to matter now. Ain’t no reason to be any different from how we’ve always been.”

“You’re an _omega_ , Raylan. We ain’t talking about some sort of unsightly birthmark, here.”

“We ain’t talking about it at all,” Raylan cut him off, didn’t want to hear whatever it was Boyd had to say about omegas, or designations, or Raylan. “There's no need. Now shut up and finish your beer, and we can head out to one of those university bars in Lexington. Play some pool, find some college girls to show us a good time.”

Boyd reeled back like Raylan had punched him — not that Raylan wasn’t thinking about it, if that was the only way to shut Boyd’s mouth — and he might have looked stricken, but Raylan was focused on stomping weeds under his shoe and not on deciphering Boyd’s stupid face.

“No.” Boyd’s voice rang out like a klaxon in the mines. “I’m not bringing a girl back to my truck and laying her out where I had you a few days before.” Raylan winced, faced with the second part of a discussion he had hoped to avoid. “I ain’t letting you bring one back, either.”

“You don’t get a say in what I do or don’t do,” Raylan snarled, furious at Boyd’s orders. Raylan’s goddamned biology didn’t give Boyd the right to lay down any laws. “I ain’t your bitch.”

Boyd slid off the truck like he might come around and enforce his orders with teeth, and Raylan saw red.

“Fine,” he growled, the world too bright and dizzying in his anger, words tumbling like drops of blood off his tongue. “You won’t come to Lexington, that’s fine. Makes it easier for me to get laid, sink my dick into a girl’s cunt without some pervert in the back enjoying the show.”

Raylan hadn’t been looking at Boyd, and so he wasn’t prepared for the keys that crashed into his chest, cracking his sternum, the brass knuckles of a punch.

“Fuck you!” Boyd’s face was angled so that Raylan couldn’t see more than the flush high on one cheek, the tendons straining in his neck. “Take the truck and get the fuck out of here, if you’re that desperate to get laid without a _pervert_ in your way.”

Then Boyd curled his hands over his ribs. It was a familiar gesture, and one that doused Raylan's anger and left nothing but ice in its wake. It was how Raylan had reacted to everyone he met, before Boyd had shown up in middle school and refused to go away. Before Raylan had realized that not everyone came for him with their fists.

Boyd didn’t need to do that. Boyd didn’t need to protect himself from _Raylan_.

“It’s twenty miles back to town,” Raylan said, smiling gently to show how funny it was, that Boyd thought Raylan would actually go. He lifted his hands, palms out as he strode toward Boyd. He hadn’t intended to make Boyd look that small. “Don’t be an idiot. You can’t walk twenty miles before dark.”

If he could just get Boyd to straighten up and grin, Raylan’s gut would untwist and everything would be fine.

“Then leave me a blanket, and I’ll spend the night.” Boyd slid to the ground, refused to glance up and acknowledge Raylan. “Now go away.”

Raylan shivered, and not because his jacket was worn through at the elbows and too short in the sleeves.

Boyd had never once asked Raylan to leave. He wouldn’t leave even when Raylan tried to make him. (He climbed up ladders with a bottle of whiskey and broke windows, instead.) Boyd wasn’t the sort of person who _understood_ defeat, much less admitted it.

“Look, I – I shouldn’t have said that,” Raylan muttered, coming around the truck to crouch next to Boyd, regret blooming warm in his cheeks. In twenty-four hours, he’d accused Boyd of attempting rape and called him a pervert. Being outed as an omega was fucking with Raylan’s head. “I wouldn’t, you know that. I wasn’t going to.”

Even if he’d driven to Lexington, he wouldn’t have been able to follow through. He could feel the line down his sternum where the keys had hit, the presentiment of a crack that would ricochet through his chest if Boyd ever did what Raylan had threatened to do.

“I don’t want it the way it was last year,” Boyd said, finally turning to stare at Raylan, the gold flecks in his eyes swallowed up by muddy brown. “I want it the way it was three nights ago, where we don’t pick up any girls at all. But that’s too much for you, ain’t it?”

Boyd’s breath on Raylan’s cheek, Boyd’s razor-sharp incisors against his mouth. Raylan’s lip was still swollen, days later, where he kept worrying at the fading imprint of Boyd’s teeth. Raylan had been desperate for Boyd, then, rutting against Boyd’s alpha cock, the smell and taste and feel of him flooding Raylan’s mouth with saliva, making his dick leak and his asshole clench. It _was_ too much: it was _Boyd_ , how could it have been anything else?

“You want it because I’m an omega.”

That was the only explanation. Boyd wasn’t a faggot. He wasn’t going to go queer for his beta best friend. It answered Raylan’s question, he supposed, of who he was when someone looked at him and didn’t see the poor beta whelp that the whole county knew. They saw an omega, and omegas existed for alphas to take.

“I didn’t know you were an omega three days ago, did I?” Boyd retorted, unfolding to knock one knee into Raylan’s shin. Raylan resisted the emasculating urge to grab Boyd’s knee and hold on, though he couldn’t help sliding his hand into Boyd’s, tugging Boyd’s arm away from his ribs.

“I still can’t quite believe it,” Boyd admitted, looking Raylan up and down. “Especially now that you don’t smell.”

“That’s ‘cause I shower, knothead,” Raylan muttered, but he’d also taken three sups when he woke up and applied half a stick of deodorant and several splashes of cheap cologne.

And maybe Boyd was telling the truth. Boyd ran his schemes on faith: his own, that he could believe something for as long as it took to persuade his mark. Maybe he’d sensed Raylan years ago, and tucked it into his subconscious so he could convince them both that he didn’t know.

Boyd tilted his head until their lips brushed, until Raylan’s suppressant-dampened senses could feel an alpha close.

“Raylan,” he breathed, Raylan’s name the promise of dawn sung through the gloaming, the rumble of the elevator coming for them at the end of their shift, the faulty muffler that always caught the breath in Raylan’s chest and sent him running for the drive, anxious for the sight of his best friend behind the wheel. “Raylan, I am waiting for you to tell me no.”

“No,” Raylan said, and leaned into the kiss.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Have a chapter! Okay, now that this story is finished if not thoroughly edited, it looks like it comes out to 15 chapters (though one is more like an interlude). So we're slightly more than halfway there! (They stay 19 for a very long time. The next twenty years will go much quicker. ;) )


	9. Chapter 9

For weeks, Raylan waited for other shoe to drop, for Boyd’s teeth to lengthen and his fists to swing. But nothing happened. Boyd kept his teeth retracted and his canines away from the unscarred hollows of Raylan’s throat. Moreover, he continued to roll his eyes and wave indulgently from over the top of his book when Raylan picked fights with other white trash, hot-blooded Harlan boys, never once trying to protect Raylan’s fragile omega body, or otherwise interfere.

When Asa Moore had commented on Raylan’s continued presence in Harlan — Moore was clearly spoiling for a fight, though Boyd said after, it wasn’t _Asa_ who’d swung first — Boyd had yawned and crawled into the cab of the truck, fished _The Counterlife_ out of the glove compartment and told Raylan to come on back when he was done brawling so they could go shooting before it went full dark.

Raylan waited, but nothing much seemed to change. He drove his truck past the Crowder place in the evenings and Boyd came tearing down the drive like his boots were on fire, generally shrugging into his coat and still dripping from the shower, black hair plastered to his forehead and neck.

They shot Bo’s revolvers or went hunting until it was too dark to tell a bush from a turkey, then kicked back for another few hours until their shift began — parked under a streetlight playing cards, cleaning the diner for Rella in return for free food and a warm place to pass the time, lying in the truck bed jostling each other for elbow space and searching for shooting stars. Then they went down to the mines, where Raylan carved his name into each coal tombstone and Boyd dove out of cuts shouting “Fire in the hole!”

On weekends there was the drive-in, or the dance halls up in Cumberland, poker games with some of the crew in Briggs’s garage, where everyone suspected Boyd of cheating and only let him play so they could figure out how it was done. (Or because Briggs’s littlest daughter, Emmalyn, had taken an unfortunate shine to Boyd. She giggled when he pulled quarters out of her ears, young enough to believe that Boyd's pickpocketing was magic and not an inborn criminality; and their foreman couldn’t say no to a toddler in a pink nightgown asking if “Boy Coweh” would be there soon.)

The only difference, really, was the girls. In that there weren’t any.

Raylan had balked, at first — people would talk, dammit, two boys at the movies and no dates — but Boyd had scowled and cajoled and somehow set all Raylan’s arguments on their heads and shot them full of holes. Raylan kept his shoulders hunched, when they bought the tickets and stood in line for snacks, but none of the other moviegoers seemed to notice anything odd.

“I done told you,” Boyd said, once the previews started up and no one could hear. “You’re cute, darling, but you ain’t the celebrity these good people are paying to see.”

Then he slung an arm around Raylan and hauled him close, ignored Raylan’s tense shoulders and mumbled protests the same as he had the first day of seventh grade, collaring Raylan on the way to class and refusing to let him leave.

Raylan stopped mentioning girls, after that.

He didn’t miss them. No girls meant no one sitting between him and Boyd at the movies, preventing Raylan from stealing Boyd’s Raisinets, or shushing them when Boyd kept whispering ludicrous plot twists at Raylan over their heads. No girls meant they didn’t have to drive anyone home, after: they could toss the beer in the back with the blankets and race the truck up the backroads to the field, sleep in the bed or stay awake until dawn.

No girls meant that Boyd didn’t touch anyone but Raylan, and that no one else touched Boyd. That much _had_ changed, but that particular change suited Raylan just fine.

He and Boyd didn’t make out in theaters, or at the drive-in like they had done when they brought girls. They certainly didn’t take the truck up to the ridge where half of Harlan County rode out the climax of their dates.

But nobody else ever showed up at the clearing they’d claimed years before, two boys exploring every nook and cranny of the county after Raylan had inherited his uncle’s truck. They drove up to the field every weekend and some evenings before work, passed the time exploring every nook and cranny of each other’s mouths.

Briggs complained that they ought to stop taking girls out on work nights, both of them obviously kissed stupid and Boyd likely to fuck up the powder and blow them sky high.

“I just might,” Boyd agreed, staring hungrily at Raylan’s swollen lips. Raylan bit the lower one, blushing, and Boyd grinned.

Briggs wasn’t wrong, though: they kissed for hours in the truck, kissed until Raylan’s skin was buzzing and the world was a blur of incomprehensible lights and sounds, kissed until he was too stupid to understand anything but Boyd’s lips and teeth and tongue.

Raylan hadn’t known it could be like that. He’d been kissing girls since he was thirteen, seven minutes in a closet with Ruby Sorenson and her sharp braces, two kisses and one with tongue when Reenie Tucker spun the bottle towards him twice in a row. Kissing was what kids did before they presented and started having sex instead.

He’d avoided kissing, once he’d learned that girls were more than appreciative of his other talents: bruises sucked onto their necks, fingers rubbing circles on their clits. He didn’t like the waxy taste of girls’ lipstick in his mouth, or how their heads obstructed his view of the truck bed where Boyd would be laid out with his girl so Raylan could see.

Boyd didn’t wear lipstick. When Raylan kissed Boyd, he wasn’t trying to tilt his head and peer through Boyd’s hair. He didn’t need to strain to see through the window when Boyd was already laid out under his hands.

Kissing led to fornicating. At least that’s what Coach Morgan had promised them in Health class, though he’d also said that fornicating led to gonorrhea and the fires of hell. Raylan didn’t expect Coach had meant that metaphorically — though fornicating had gotten his mama claimed by Arlo Givens, who was meaner than the Devil and far worse than the clap.

Despite Coach’s vehement assurances, however, kissing Boyd didn’t lead _anywhere_. (Though it would certainly get Raylan killed, one day, and send him straight to hell.)

They kissed, and kissed, until Raylan couldn’t form words, his mouth empty without Boyd’s tongue. They kissed and pinned each other to the seat, slotting legs together and hitching thighs up while they ground down, the kissing rougher as they rutted their way to a boy’s orgasm, coming in their jeans like Raylan hadn’t since he was fourteen. And then they went back to kissing, as soon as they’d caught their breaths, come cooling in their boxers and skin flushed as they worked themselves up all over again.

Nobody had so much as taken off a shirt. Raylan was torn between relief that Boyd hadn’t tried to flip him over and mount him with teeth bared, and frustration that his cock was left chafing and neglected in his jeans while Boyd’s fingers were digging into his waist inches away.

If he had been making time with a girl, Raylan would have gone to Boyd complaining that she never made a goddamned move.

“You got two good hands, Raylan Givens,” Boyd would have told him, arching a brow at Raylan’s fidgeting fingers and smirking lasciviously at Raylan’s red cheeks. “I don’t see no reason this girl ought to make a move on you, if you’re too chickenshit to go first.”

Raylan assumed the advice would hold true in this case: he could hardly ask Boyd about _Boyd_ , after all, and he didn’t have any other friends. (And even if he had, he sure as hell wouldn’t ask them for the best route from queer kissing to sodomy.)

So the next weekend, Raylan stole a jar of his mama’s moonshine. Boyd tossed their rifles and poles in the truck and drove them way out into the hills and a hunting cabin too remote for anyone to use. And after they unrolled their sleeping bags — and built a fire and were sprawled out on the floor like rich folks on a bearskin rug, tongues twined together and Boyd’s fingers hooked in Raylan’s belt loops — Raylan took Boyd’s advice, and took off his shirt.

Boyd inhaled sharply, wonder dawning in his eyes. Boyd was an idiot, acting like this was anything he hadn’t seen a hundred times: Raylan naked in the cab up on the ridge with a girl, Raylan shirtless in the sun as they blew fish out of the millpond, Raylan stripped bare and cannonballing into the lake, drunk on cheap whiskey and summer heat.

“Christ, Raylan, you’re –”

“Call me pretty and you’ll regret it, Crowder,” Raylan warned, and Boyd’s mouth whipped shut.

He’d already said it, though; Raylan’s name a quiet genuflection, the spill of perfume across a messiah’s dusty feet.

Raylan blamed the fire for his blush, heat flickering over his shoulders and burning trails in the wake of Boyd’s adulating touch.

“Fair’s fair,” Raylan insisted, bent in for another kiss before divesting Boyd of his ridiculous turtleneck, leaving his unruly dark hair in disarray.

His breath caught, and he understood suddenly how Boyd must have felt. He’d seen Boyd naked — seen him shirtless that morning in the locker room — but never like this. Raylan could lean forward to lick away the sweat glistening on Boyd’s chest, could fit his fingers in between Boyd’s ribs, brush his thumbs over Boyd’s brown nipples and watch the shiver run under Boyd’s skin.

“Come here,” he rumbled, the words dragged from his chest, blown through his lips like smoke from a joint.

He pushed Boyd down into the flannel lining of the sleeping bags, scraped his short nails up Boyd’s side to watch the red welts that followed, proof that Raylan had touched Boyd. Proof that Boyd belonged to Raylan. His dick jerked, at the thought, and he followed Boyd down, sinking his dull teeth into the faded tan of Boyd’s chest, biting to leave marks.

“Fuck, Raylan, I ain’t a chicken leg,” Boyd groused, but from the way he shuddered under Raylan’s teeth and tongue, Raylan assumed he didn’t really mind.

Raylan licked a wide stripe over Boyd’s nipple. Boyd yelped and clutched the back of Raylan’s head, so he did it again. He slid one hand down to the top of Boyd’s jeans, dragging his fingertips to the top of Boyd’s hipbone and just above the fabric of his boxers, where he could feel Boyd’s muscles contract under his hand. Still devoting his tongue and teeth to Boyd’s nipples — _Christ_ , Boyd was more sensitive than a girl — Raylan fumbled at the buckle on Boyd’s belt.

Raylan had been wearing belts since he was five, could put his own on with one hand while mostly asleep, but that skill didn’t seem to transfer to undoing someone else’s belt when all Raylan’s blood was pulsing through his nerves and leaving his hands numb. Boyd didn’t help, just groaned and dragged Raylan into a messy kiss, his hands stroking down Raylan’s back, sliding into Raylan’s pockets and squeezing his ass.

Raylan finally lifted up onto his knees so that he could use both hands. He undid Boyd’s belt, popped the button on his jeans and tugged them down Boyd’s skinny hips. He buried his face against the taut line of Boyd’s neck, where he couldn’t see Boyd’s darkened eyes. Where he couldn’t see what his fingers were doing, sliding under the thin cotton of Boyd’s boxers and brushing over the damp, velvet-soft skin at the head of his dick.

“Oh,” Boyd gasped, hips stuttering up towards Raylan’s hand. “Oh. Raylan.” He tugged his own boxers down, kicked them off along with his jeans before sliding one hand back through Raylan’s hair.

Masturbating was easy: take dick in hand, stroke, come. Raylan had sussed that out for himself at eleven, listening to the older Maclaren boys while they waited for the bus.

It became far more complicated when the dick in question belonged to someone else. Raylan dropped to his side next to Boyd, his own leaking erection pressed between his stomach and Boyd’s hip. Raylan took a deep breath, and looked down.

The head of Boyd’s dick was flushed dark red, drooling at the slit, the fluid a strange milky color instead of the egg-white clear of Raylan’s come. Raylan had assumed that the girls were exaggerating, when they’d moaned about being split open on Boyd’s cock, but it made Raylan’s hand seem small, foreskin rolled back and knot thickening the base. Boyd never knotted the girls — claimed he didn’t want to sit around for god knew how long testing whether the condom would hold — just wrapped his hand around the base of his cock and squeezed hard when he came.

Raylan mimicked the motion, sliding his hand down and squeezing Boyd’s inflating knot. That was all it took. Boyd groaned, threw his head back, and came all over his stomach. Raylan watched with his mouth gaping, transfixed by the sight of Boyd’s thick cock pulsing, his hand limp around the swell of Boyd’s knot.

He tilted his head and shifted his hand to scoop some of the opaque come onto his fingers, lifted them to his nose. He could smell Boyd, then, the way he’d be able to smell him all the time if it weren’t for the sups. Raylan stuck out his tongue, tasting the air like Boyd always did, and lapped at his fingertips.

“Fuck, Raylan,” Boyd murmured, staring up at Raylan from lust blackened eyes. “You’re going to be the death of me.”

His grip on Raylan’s wrist belied his languorous sprawl, and a second later he had Raylan on his back, sucking Raylan’s fingers into his own mouth.

Raylan shivered.

“Oh, you like that?” Boyd smirked arrogantly around Raylan’s index finger. Raylan could feel his cheeks go hot, his mouth dry at the sight of Boyd’s lips in a perfect ‘o’. “Is that what you want?” he purred.

Boyd pressed a kiss to Raylan’s fingertips and vanished before Raylan could think of an answer. His tongue reappeared a moment later, licking tentatively at the head of Raylan’s cock.

Raylan sat straight up, both hands shooting down to cover his dick. “What the hell are you doing?” he squeaked, sounding more like an omega than he ever had. “You can’t do that!”

Boyd had obviously not anticipated that response. “Why the hell not?” he replied, still crouched between Raylan’s legs. “You’ve had –

 He trailed off, no doubt considering all the times that Raylan _hadn’t_ had his dick sucked. “Okay, you haven’t had a blow job. Don’t you like them?” Boyd wondered, sounding horrified by the idea that Raylan might _not_.

“I wouldn’t know that, would I?” Raylan retorted acidly. “Since I’ve never had one.”

Boyd raised an eyebrow and settled back onto his knees. He licked his lips and Raylan had to choke down a whimper at the sight.

“I wasn’t sure if they would taste it,” he explained, scowling at the fireplace. “That I wasn’t a beta like I said.”

Boyd sighed, and used his hands to pry Raylan’s away. “Now, that’s all very sensible, Raylan. In fact, I believe we ought to put your hypothesis to the test.” Raylan blinked at the grin curling one side of Boyd’s mouth, wary of that Crowder smile. “It’s to our mutual benefit, you see. You want to know if you taste like a beta. And _I_ want to know how you taste.”

Boyd licked up Raylan’s cock the way he curled his tongue around the dripping edges of his ice cream cone every summer. Raylan thought he might pass out just from the warm puff of air on his cock when Boyd exhaled.

“Tell me no, Raylan,” Boyd offered, wrapping one hand around the base of Raylan’s erection and his mouth around the head.

It was better than sex, Boyd’s mouth on Raylan’s dick. The flat of Boyd’s tongue, the honeyed point of it everywhere at once, the wet and the warmth and the feel of Boyd sucking Raylan down. Raylan watched his cock slide between Boyd’s lips, watched Boyd’s darkened eyes watching him, and came.

The next thing he felt was a finger dragging down the crack of his ass. “Boyd!” he objected, too boneless to bother scrambling away.

“Sorry,” Boyd said, but he was pushing Raylan’s leg up, rubbing his thumb over Raylan’s asshole, swirling it through the slick. “Sorry. Fuck. I can’t – you smell so good, Raylan,” he muttered apologetically, then buried his face in Raylan’s ass.

“Stop that!” Raylan didn’t think Boyd could hear him, with his head between Raylan’s thighs and his nose pressed up behind Raylan’s balls, his tongue –

His tongue was lapping at the slick Raylan always produced when he came, running across the sensitive furl of his asshole.

“Boyd!”

Raylan’s hands were threaded through Boyd’s hair, and he pulled hard, uncertain whether or not he wanted to drag Boyd’s head away. Boyd’s pointed tongue was pushing into Raylan’s ass, thumb circling the rim, and all Raylan’s nerves felt electrified and too hot. He was shaking with it, shoving his ass helplessly against Boyd’s face, still buzzing from his first climax and cresting on something that felt even better. Something overwhelming that left him arched off the floor like a strung bow, ass clamped around Boyd’s tongue while he screamed his name.

“That was amazing,” Boyd whispered a few minutes later, wiping them clean with Boyd’s shirt. He curled onto his side behind Raylan, both of them facing the dying fire, Boyd’s arm around Raylan’s waist. “I didn’t know you could do that.”

He sounded pleased. And no wonder — he’d wrung two orgasms out of Raylan, learned that his friend the omega freak came like a whore if you stuck something up his ass.

“Yeah,” Raylan said hollowly, staring into the glowing coals so he didn’t have to think about how his wet asshole kept spasming, how he had begged for Boyd to fuck him with his tongue. “Neither did I.”

* * *

“There’s nothing out here,” Boyd whined, though he had the decency to whine quietly, squatting next to Raylan behind a bush. “All the goddamned deer are still sleeping. Like we could be,” he added pointedly, in case Raylan hadn’t missed the implication. Or in case he’d gone deaf, and therefore hadn’t heard Boyd the first _sixteen_ times he'd complained.

“I was sleeping just fine,” Raylan hissed, his breath a burst of white in the frozen, pre-dawn air. “Until someone shoved their cold hands down my pants.”

Boyd huffed and rubbed the red mark Raylan’s flailing elbow had left on his jaw, because Raylan wasn’t the sort of person who appreciated icy fingers interrupting his heated dreams. Boyd was about as warm-blooded as a snake, which half the county would have considered further proof that Clary Crowder had taken the Serpent into her marriage bed.

Boyd’s ceaseless complaining and cold hands aside, the frost on the ground meant that it really was getting too cold to sleep in the bed of the truck. Though they’d gone up to one of Granny Crowder’s derelict hunting cabins last night and run right into Boyd’s cousins from Alabama. Apparently, the extended Crowder clan descended on Harlan for hunting season, making it damn near impossible for Raylan to get his – to get Boyd alone.

“Something’s moving,” Boyd whispered, wiggling on his heels and nearly toppling over, which was par for the course when Boyd Crowder attempted to remain perfectly still. “And it sure as hell ain’t my dick, not in this weather.”

“That’s too bad.” Raylan’s left knee twinged, and he leaned on Boyd to take the weight off of it, trying to shake it out before his leg cramped and his cursing scared off the deer. “Though I suppose it wouldn’t make much of a hunting trophy. Too small.”

“Only ‘cause it’s _cold_ ,” Boyd snapped defensively, and Raylan had to muffle his laugh against Boyd’s coat. Last night had also proven that they wouldn’t be having much sex for the next few months, unless they found somewhere warmer or left the truck running till it ran out of gas and died.

“Are those antlers?” Raylan whispered, pointing at a flash of brown way out in the trees. “Over there, to the right of the old stone fence.”

Boyd peered through the trees, then shook his head. “Looks like a doe,” he murmured, and they sighed. They’d gotten plenty of meat last weekend, enough for venison steak and sausage to fill the game freezer in Raylan’s basement. They’d come out this weekend searching for a trophy buck, antlers to rival the fourteen-point rack that was Bo Crowder’s pride and joy.

“We’re gonna be here all day,” Raylan lamented, because dawn was already filtering through the trees and they had yet to see a buck whose antlers had more than two points.

“We can’t stay here all day.” Boyd’s voice was a puff of white between his pale lips and the leafless bushes they were hiding behind. Raylan shifted backwards and arched his brows in surprise. Once Raylan decided on a course of action, Boyd rarely disagreed. Meddled with or sabotaged it, sure, but rarely disagreed. “There’s a football game this afternoon, up at Cumberland. Bowman’s playing.” And Boyd never missed a single one of his little brother’s games.

Five hours at least, for the game and the drive, and another few to celebrate if the Black Bears won. Boyd would be gone till late, and there was nowhere warm to meet up after dark, not during deer season when all the hunting shacks were full.

Raylan scowled, half his weekend lost to Bowman’s fucking football game.

“Look!” Boyd gestured left, his glove brushing Raylan’s nose. “Behind those pine trees. That’s got to be at least six points there. Maybe eight.” Raylan squinted, but the buck was too far away for them to see the size of his rack. “Son, imagine _those_ antlers on your wall.”

“We’ll have to wait for him to come out of those trees,” Raylan said, sighting down his rifle and unable to get a clear shot. Then he looked at Boyd and thought of him gone the rest of the day, Raylan out in the woods with no one to help him drag the deer to the truck, no one to tease him for not taking a risky shot. “Unless you need to leave,” he added, frowning. “Wouldn’t want to keep you from the big game.”

Boyd exhaled slowly, deliberately, air slipping off his tongue like smoke from a cigarette. “You could come along,” he said, fidgeting with the cuff of his glove. “We could head to the bar, afterwards, and shoot some pool.”

They could earn some money shooting pool, Boyd meant, lose a few games until the other guys grew cocky enough to lay down some serious cash, then demonstrate that a couple of hayseed hillbilly boys knew their way around a cue.

They’d been banned from a bar in Berea, for hustling, and one in Cumberland when hustling had led to brawling. (Had led to Boyd licking the blood off Raylan’s teeth once they were in the truck and no one could see. That had been a good night.)

“I could come along?” Raylan echoed incredulously. “To sit in the stands with your daddy and your cousins and your kin from Alabama?”

“You could,” Boyd said, jaw jutting out, gloved hands clenched around the barrel of his gun.

Raylan snorted. “And have your daddy tear my throat out after Johnny punched me and Merle chewed on my ankles?” He twisted his lips, smirking hollowly at Boyd. “I ain’t welcome there, Boyd, same as you ain’t welcome in Arlo’s home.”

The buck shifted, and they fell silent, watched its muzzle drop to graze along the frozen ground. A few more steps, and Raylan could take the shot.

“You would be welcome amongst my kin,” Boyd said softly, a muscle jumping in his cheek and his eyes boring holes in the fabric of his jeans. Boyd had eyes the color of a tornado sky, whirling gray to sickly brown to flashes of green, no predicting when menacing clouds would coalesce into something far deadlier. “If they knew.”

Raylan’s eyebrows shot up past the brim of his cap. “You think they’d be _less_ inclined to shoot me if they knew we were fucking?” he asked, shocked into a choked-off laugh.

Then he read the tension in Boyd’s shoulders, the banked hope in his averted eyes, and realized what it was, precisely, that Boyd hoped to proclaim to his kin. Not two boys fucking. Not _faggots_ , but Boyd Crowder, conquering alpha, his omega boy on a leash. There it was: the other shoe Raylan had been waiting for, the one he'd begun to think would never drop. Stupid. He'd been stupid, to hope.

“You want to tell them what an alpha you are, is that it?” he wondered, voice as icy as the wind cutting through their clothes. “Boyd Crowder, who sunk his big teeth into the only male freak in Kentucky. You want to be a legend, people come from all over to praise your nose and your virility, sniffing out something so rare?”

“That ain’t it,” Boyd protested. He shifted to face Raylan and a branch cracked under his boot, the noise loud in the quiet forest. The buck lifted his head, and Raylan and Boyd stopped breathing until the deer chuffed out a breath and went back to snuffling through the frost-tipped leaves and grass. “I’m not asking to publish it in the _Daily Enterprise_. I am merely saying we wouldn’t have to hide, or freeze our asses off in your truck, if people knew how it really was.”

_How it really was_.

Boyd always said that it didn’t matter, that he’d wanted Raylan the surly beta and he’d want him just the same without the slick or scent or the orgasms that crashed into Raylan like waves, the next one cresting as the first rolled through. Raylan should have known better than to believe him.

What really mattered, apparently, was that Raylan’s biology meant they could tell the whole damned town and no one would call Boyd Crowder Raylan’s bitch ever again.

“No one would believe you,” Raylan told him pragmatically, forcing the words past the bile rising in his throat. “They’d think it was more of your bullshit, an excuse for us being faggots in broad daylight where anyone and God could see.”

“It’s definitely eight points,” Boyd announced instead of responding to Raylan, peering through the foliage at the deer. “Can you hit him, you think?” They’d only have one shot, and Raylan had a better chance of bringing the buck down.

He waited until Raylan’s full attention was on his rifle and the slow movements of the buck’s nose along the ground, the twitching of his ears.

Then he said, “They’d believe us if they could scent you,” and Raylan’s finger jerked on the trigger, sent his bullet flying wild through the air.

The buck flipped up its tail and ran, and the failed shot echoed through the forest while Raylan gaped at Boyd over the barrel of his gun.

“If I stopped taking my suppressants, you mean?” he asked hoarsely, unable to believe that Boyd had thought about it, much less said it aloud. “ _That’s_ what you want? You want to rip out my throat, knock me up and stick me in the kitchen where omegas belong?”

Raylan stood up and stepped away from Boyd, scaring off any game dumb enough to stick around after the rifle shot.

“You want me to bare my neck so anyone can take a sniff, maybe spread my legs and prove to the county that I’m exactly what my daddy says, a weak bitch who’ll bend over for the Crowder boy?” Boyd’s face had gone white, eyes wide and lips parted but no words on his silver tongue. He looked surprised, like he hadn't ever bothered to consider what going off sups would mean for _Raylan_. “Will that be enough to make you happy? Will it convince everyone that you’re a real man?”

Boyd made an inarticulate sound, could no doubt scent Raylan's distress, if he couldn't hear it in the shouting that had cleared the forest of game. He reached out to Raylan — and it was an alpha’s hand, same as his daddy’s, same as Bo’s. Raylan had been a fool to believe that their biology didn’t dictate who they would be, more confining than the hills and the legacies written in their blood. He moved away, spun around and headed for the truck at a jog that thundered through the silent woods.

“Raylan!” Boyd came crashing through the branches behind him, snagging the back of Raylan’s coat. “Dammit, Raylan. That’s not how it is. You know that ain’t how it is,” he panted, pulling Raylan so he was looking at Boyd’s earnest face, the ardent depths of his tornado eyes.

“Maybe not,” Raylan allowed, wrenching himself free from Boyd’s grip and his sincerity. He’d believed Boyd before; he couldn’t afford to do it again, now that he couldn’t trust himself to know when Boyd was lying to them both.

Boyd’s face brightened at Raylan’s concession, and Raylan looked away.

“Maybe that ain’t how it is,” Raylan said quietly, and he could see Boyd’s face fall out of the corner of his eye. “But that’s how it would be.”

He started walking again, and Boyd followed a few steps later, trudging behind without trying to catch up and wrap his arms around Raylan or nibble at his ear, without claiming that they had a few hours to kill and one surefire way to keep warm.

“It’s how it would be,” Raylan reminded himself, tried to brand the words under his eyelids so he couldn’t tuck himself against Boyd and forget.

The forest answered his proclamation with silence, and Boyd had nothing to say in his own defense. Though perhaps Boyd had been too busy tracing the contours of Raylan’s neck, imagining the scar he would carve into Raylan’s throat, and he hadn’t heard a word that Raylan said.

* * *

“You forgive me then?” Boyd asked, his smug grin at odds with the quaver in his voice and the hesitance in his eyes.

He licked his lips and settled his chin on Raylan’s thigh, the scratch of stubble making Raylan shiver as his cock jerked, still sensitive from the blow job Boyd had offered as soon as they’d tumbled through the door.

Raylan cut a disapproving gaze down at Boyd, but the effect was ruined when Boyd bent the two fingers he’d slid inside Raylan and made him moan, Raylan’s mouth falling open and eyes squeezing shut.

The blow job had followed a movie where Boyd paid for the tickets _and_ the snacks. The movie had come after an afternoon where Boyd drove them out to their impromptu shooting range and handed Raylan a full box of ammunition for the revolvers. Raylan had assumed they’d be aiming at trees, as usual, but Boyd had been up during the week with his mama’s old clothesline, had rigged it so they could clip up old clothes and create a moving target to shoot.

Boyd hadn’t said he was sorry for suggesting Raylan go off his sups and come out as an omega, but he’d been apologizing all week nonetheless. He’d even woken up early after a shift to drive Raylan to the clinic in Lexington for more suppressants, let him sleep on the way there and choose the music for the ride home.

“Are you begging for forgiveness?” Raylan drawled, sucking in a breath as Boyd scissored his fingers, putting a delicious pressure on the edges of Raylan’s hole. “Or are you begging to fuck me?”

“Crowders don’t beg.”

Boyd’s gaze flickered up to Raylan’s face and back between his legs, watching his fingers pump in and out of Raylan’s ass. He glanced back at Raylan, chewing on his bottom lip, searching for something in Raylan’s lidded eyes. “Does that – Raylan, does that mean that I could? Fuck you?” And it was a sight to see, Boyd Crowder’s predatory confidence replaced with stuttering stage fright.

They hadn’t discussed any of Raylan’s reservations regarding Boyd’s alpha dick in his ass; but Raylan had brought his concerns to the clinic, earlier that week, and been reassured. He hadn’t actually _spoken_ to anyone, but the brightly colored posters in the exam room swore that suppressants prevented pregnancy. Especially in Harlan, which his doctors complained had the lowest birthrate in the state, kept handing him pamphlets about the dangers of hard water and good nutrition and black lung. (It was enough to know that he wasn’t going to get pregnant. Raylan didn’t want to know if he _could_.)

And Raylan couldn’t deny how blindingly good it felt, to come with Boyd’s fingers buried inside him, or on Boyd’s talented tongue. He had been careful to stay away from alpha girls for years, but he couldn’t stay away from Boyd, and there was no escaping the fact that his body was desperate to make him Boyd’s bitch.

“Ain’t you going to say please?” Raylan smirked, bucking into Boyd’s fingers in a silent demand for more. “I could come like this,” he taunted breathlessly, as Boyd pulled out and pushed three fingers back in. “And enjoy it. Your fingers are so much thicker than your cock.”

Boyd bit Raylan’s inner thigh in retaliation, a bloodless nip with his alpha teeth tucked away. “Now you know that ain’t true,” he murmured, his voice vibrating against Raylan’s skin. “Surely you heard the girls shrieking they’d never had it so big.”

Raylan may or may not have heard any such thing. He’d certainly never thrust into a girl and come, imagining the feel of Boyd’s cock in a cunt he didn’t have or want.

“Well I ain’t begging,” he replied, panting, the lassitude from his first orgasm fading and his blood rushing too quickly through his veins, skin tingling and nipples hard from nothing but the brush of cool air through the room. “And you ain’t said please.”

“Please,” Boyd whispered, grinning, and dragged his fingers slowly out of Raylan’s ass, lifted them to his mouth and licked them clean.

“Pretty please, Raylan Givens,” Boyd pleaded, brown eyes blown black and glittering as he hooked one arm under Raylan’s knee and shifted up Raylan’s body, his mouth inches away from Raylan’s and the head of his cock slipping up the wet crack of Raylan’s ass. “May I fuck you? Might I split you open on my dick?”

“You can try,” Raylan told him, and lifted his head to claim Boyd’s mouth in a sloppy kiss interrupted by their panting and Boyd’s cursing when his cock caught on Raylan’s hole and then slipped up to press against his balls instead of sliding inside.

He finally reached down and grasped himself at the base, leaning back to watch his cock stretch Raylan’s slick hole wider than his fingers could, Raylan gasping beneath him and bucking off the floor.

“Fuck, you’re tighter than a girl's cunt,” Boyd groaned, his hand tightening on the base of his dick, rocking slowly into Raylan. “Is this all right? You’re all right?”

“Jesus Christ, Boyd,” Raylan moaned, hands clutching the sleeping bag. “Stop fussing like a bitch and fuck me.” He crooked his leg around Boyd’s narrow hip and dug his heel into Boyd’s ass to emphasize his point, pushing Boyd forward and sinking his cock into Raylan. “ _Now_.”

Boyd’s mouth fell open, his face blanked with pleasure. He ran one finger along the edge of Raylan’s hole where it was stretched around his cock, and Raylan’s body vibrated at the soft touch.

“Raylan,” Boyd whispered adoringly, pushing into Raylan until there wasn’t any space between them, Boyd’s hips snug against Raylan’s ass, the dark curls of his pubic hair damp with Raylan’s slick. “Raylan.”

He lowered his mouth to Raylan’s in a bruising claim of a kiss, ravishing Raylan’s mouth while he spitted Raylan on his dick. Raylan dragged his fingernails down Boyd’s chest, demanding, and Boyd gasped out a wordless moan into Raylan’s mouth. Then he slid his cock back, the head dragging over the spot that always made lights explode behind Raylan’s eyes — Boyd set Raylan on fire same as he did to everything that would burn, thrust his cock into Raylan and lit dynamite under his skin — and split Raylan wide open, made him scream.

 

“How long is this gonna last?” Raylan groaned, his ass clenching weakly around Boyd’s swollen knot, muscles stretched farther than he’d thought possible. He twisted his hips, trying to pop loose, but that just set Boyd’s knot up against something that drove all the air out of Raylan’s chest, made his cock twitch and pulse out another strand of come, made Boyd growl and grind his blown knot harder into Raylan.

“As you are most certainly aware,” Boyd mumbled into Raylan’s sweaty neck. “I have never performed this particular act, and thus have absolutely no idea how long it will last. Why?” he wondered. “You ain’t enjoying this?” He nipped at Raylan’s neck with dull teeth, yelping in surprise when Raylan backhanded him and sent them both rolling onto their sides. “Fuck, Raylan, what the hell?”

“You didn’t say anything about knotting,” Raylan snapped, ignoring the reddening handprint on Boyd’s cheek and the aggrieved look in his eyes. “And keep your goddamned teeth away from my neck.”

Boyd frowned. Raylan could feel it like the pressure drop before a storm, a weight settling in the air.

The sups didn’t seem to work as well as they had for the first five years after he’d presented — maybe because he was nineteen and taller, or his metabolism had changed, or maybe he’d been right to avoid sex with an alpha for so long. He could scent Boyd, now, though it was faint: his emotions, the alpha echoes to his voice, something else that smelled more dangerous than gunpowder and fire damp.

“I didn’t exactly plan for this outcome,” Boyd replied, and didn’t say a word about Raylan’s violent reaction to Boyd’s mouth on his neck. He ran a gentling hand along Raylan’s spine, smooth, firm strokes up and down his back, rocking unconsciously into Raylan.

Boyd didn’t point out that Raylan had begged for this outcome, this _particular act_. That he had wrapped his legs around Boyd and demanded his knot, sent Boyd over the edge with nails digging into his shoulders and his ass clamped tight as a vise around Boyd’s alpha cock.

Raylan had wanted to beg for more than that. He had come around Boyd’s knot, his own dick untouched, and arched off the floor, head thrown back and throat bared. He’d screamed Boyd’s name, but he’d wanted to plead for his teeth, to force Boyd’s head to his neck the way he’d forced the knot. He’d wanted to be _claimed_.

If Boyd hadn’t kissed him then, Raylan would have begged to be put on his knees and chained with a binding scar. He would have thrown himself under Boyd’s heel and asked to be crushed.

“Come here and kiss me, Raylan.” Boyd smiled fondly at Raylan’s stormy face, his heart in his eyes. (It must have been a trick of the firelight. Crowders didn’t have hearts — Harlan legend had it that they’d bargained them away decades before, that the first coal seam in Harlan was found under a crossroads, the black rock of a buried Crowder heart.)

Raylan went, though there’d been no command in Boyd’s voice. It wasn’t Boyd’s fault that Raylan’s sups were subpar, or that his stupid omega hindbrain craved Boyd’s knot and the manacles of his claim.

He wanted to shove Boyd away, to tear himself free from the knot and from his eagerness to spread his legs and submit — he wanted to do it again, could feel lust sizzling through his nerves and trembling deep in his gut, the fervid desire to make himself Boyd’s bitch.

Raylan deepened the kiss, pressed his mouth to Boyd’s until their teeth cut into their lips, dragged his hands through Boyd’s hair until the world was nothing but the powder and flint of Boyd’s fingers and his tongue and every inch of his sweat-drenched skin. Raylan threw himself into the kiss and waited for Boyd to light the fuse, to throw the match into the gasoline and blow Raylan’s whirling thoughts to cinders and ash in the fireworks they’d create.

Boyd curled his tongue into Raylan’s pleading mouth, and obliged.


	10. Chapter 10

When Boyd was little, his mother would tuck him and Bowman into the back of the car some nights — the nights his daddy wasn’t home but Granny surely was, critiquing her daughter-in-law’s cooking, cleaning, and child rearing in assiduous detail — and drive them up to the fancy part of town. They would sit on that hill, looking down at the lights of Harlan in the dark.

Bowman always fell asleep on the drive, curled into the ratty blanket he wouldn’t let them wash, drooling on Boyd’s arm. Mama left him in the backseat, snoring away, while she and Boyd sat on the trunk, surveying the town like they were Harlan’s gods.

“How’d you know Daddy was your mate?” Boyd asked, recollecting something Aunt Frances had said earlier that day, when she’d come for a visit with her pup.

(“You remember Raylan,” Boyd’s mama had said, her hands on his shoulders pushing him toward the boy with big eyes and a bruise on one cheek. “Y’all are in the same class at Sunday School. Go on now, and show Raylan that swing Daddy rigged while your Aunt Frances and I talk.”

Boyd and Raylan had crept in through the back door to steal some cookies — they were outlaws, and thieving was what outlaws did — and overheard their mamas talking about alphas, voices low. Aunt Frances said Clary could have had anyone she chose, and yet here she was under Bo’s thumb.)

Boyd’s mama sighed and tugged loose the cigarette she always kept above her ear, pulling a few golden strands free from her ponytail. She dug the lighter from her pocket and let Boyd spin the wheel, his fingers too small to spark a flame.

“Well, now,” she said, breathing smoke out the side of her mouth and smiling at Boyd the tight, tired way she smiled at Bowman when he was refusing to go to bed. “I dreamed you and your brother up. Knew I had to have you, and when it came to choosing a mate, your daddy was hardly the worst of the lot.”

Boyd’s daddy could pick Boyd up by his ankles and hold him with one hand. When he put Boyd on his shoulders, Boyd could see clear over everyone else’s heads and over the tree tops like a giant. He was strong, too. Last week Boyd had kicked Bowman because Bowman was dumb, and once his daddy was done with him Boyd couldn’t sit down for the rest of the day without his butt burning like he’d sat on the stove. (“That’s what daddies do,” Raylan had explained, when Boyd asked how he’d come by that bruise. “My daddy says he’s trying to knock some sense into me, but that I’m too stupid for it to stick.”)

“But that’s not _knowing_ ,” Boyd complained, picking at a scab on his elbow. “You said when I’m older, I’ll meet somebody and just know.”

Mama exhaled smoke through her nose and laughed, bent to brush Boyd’s hair off his forehead and kiss his nose. “You will, baby,” she promised, letting him drop his head into her lap and bury his yawn in her skirt. “You’ll meet a sweet girl, and your stomach will fill up with butterflies. Your mouth will go dry and your heart will race faster than the coal train out of the hills, beating clickety-clack clickety-clack.”

“That sounds gross,” Boyd mumbled, his eyes blinking slowly closed. “Like last fall, when I caught the flu and hurled.”

Boyd’s mama chuckled, and he could smell the smoke from her laughter wafting through the night air. “Maybe it ain’t that different, I don't know.” She ran her long, painted fingernails through Boyd’s hair, smoothing it down and tucking it behind his ear. “Though I hope you don’t hurl. But you’ll see her, this pretty girl –”

“Will she look like you?” Boyd interrupted. “Will she have hair just like yours?”

“She’ll be even prettier than me, darling,” his mama told him, certain. “She’ll be the prettiest thing you ever seen.” Boyd thought she’d have to look exactly like his mama, then, since everyone said she was the prettiest woman in the county, maybe in the state. “And you’ll see her, and you’ll fall in love before you even learn her name. You’ll look at her and _know_ , baby, because that’s how it is with true mates.”

“Will she know?” Boyd wondered, smothering another yawn. “What if she doesn’t love me back?”

“Of course she will,” his mama promised, her voice soft as the lullabies she sang over Bowman’s crib. “Nobody could help but love you, my sweet boy, not even if they tried.”

 

“I’m gonna think you want to live in the fucking suburbs,” Raylan accused, “if you keep driving us up to Clover Hill. Now, come on and get us out of here, or we’ll miss work on account of being arrested for loitering on rich people’s lawns and sullying their views.”

Boyd sighed and started the truck, looking over at Raylan’s face illuminated by the dashboard lights and the faint glow from the streetlights on the well-paved, suburban roads.

“Quit leering at me.” Raylan rolled his eyes, fit his hand around Boyd’s chin and turned his head to face the road. “And take me back into town, where we belong.”

“I will leer at you if I so choose,” Boyd retorted, his voice muffled by Raylan’s hand under his jaw. “We might be up here with the rich folks, but I ain’t your chauffeur.”

“’Course you ain’t,” Raylan agreed, dropping his hand and draping himself across the bench seat, legs splayed, baseball cap tipped back and right hand fiddling with the broken vent on the far side of the dash. “If you were my chauffeur, I’d have to pay for the gas instead of getting my rides for free.” He flipped the radio on, rolling the tuner from old bluegrass to static to Madonna’s thready voice.

“I’ll give you a _free ride_.” Boyd lowered his voice and waggled his eyebrows. Raylan flattened his lips — as good as a grin, from anybody else — and shook his head.

“Not if you get us both killed!” he sniped, when Boyd gunned the engine around the curve, hopefully waking up the neighborhood, all those rich folks that worked normal business hours, watched the evening news and went to bed, their maids still scrubbing pans in the back rooms. “You don’t accelerate down a goddamned hill, Boyd!”

“You said you wanted to get to work on time,” Boyd told him mildly, and Raylan hit Boyd with the Stephen King novel he’d been reading before it got too dark. He’d switched to crime novels last month, after he’d finished all the Westerns in the library and realized he’d already read half of them twice.

“We still on for tomorrow? All the cousins went back to Alabama, and Daddy’s down in Bell County, so nobody ought to be up in the cabin.”

“I said yes two hours ago, didn’t I?” Raylan replied testily, dropping his head back against the seat and shifting the hat to cover his eyes. “Long as we stock up on firewood before we go, so I don’t catch hypothermia from your ice-block hands and feet.”

“I wouldn’t get so damn cold if you didn’t steal all the blankets,” Boyd objected, but Raylan turned up the radio and drowned him out with Guns N’ Roses, fluttering his fingers at Boyd in what was either a dismissal or a lazy command to stop talking and start singing along. Boyd assumed it was the latter, since Raylan’s smile dislodged the brim of his hat when Boyd belted out the chorus along with Axl Rose.

He watched Raylan’s thin fingers tap out the song’s rhythm on his knee, his whiskey eyes glinting under the streetlights once he lifted up his hat to see Boyd sing. Raylan had a few streaks of summer sunlight left in his brown hair, but he wasn’t ever going to pass as a blond — much less pull his hair into a shiny ponytail and tuck a cigarette behind the shell of one delicate ear — and his eyes weren’t wildflower blue like Clary Crowder’s had been. He certainly wasn’t the “sweet girl” Boyd’s mama had conjured for her little boy. But in nineteen years, only one person had ever made Boyd’s heart race like a coal train or set his insides spinning like a top, his belly swarming with butterflies and hummingbird wings.

Boyd didn’t know anything about love — like marriage, male omegas, and true mates, love was the sort of thing Harlan only saw on TV — but he thought he might tilt at windmills for Raylan, sail past sirens and Amazons and whirlpools to return to Raylan’s side.

“I would sing down the moon for you, Raylan Givens,” he murmured, quieter than the radio fading to static as they headed off the main street and onto the unpaved road up to the mine. “I would lasso the sun, and blast the mountains into the sea.”

Raylan stiffened, his shoulders going rigid under his coat. “Don’t, Boyd,” he gritted out, turning his head away so that Boyd could only see the muscle spasm above his clenched jaw. “Don’t say shit you don’t mean.”

Raylan’s disbelief hit Boyd the same way it always did, a steel-toed kick in his unprotected ribs.

“I ain’t –”

“You blast mountains for a paycheck.” Raylan cut him off, one hand gripping the door handle, just waiting for Boyd to park so he could escape. “Hell, you’d blow shit up for free, as long as they gave you the Emulex. You’d lasso a bomb and crater the county, maybe, but don’t pretend that’s got anything to do with me.”

He flew out of the cab as soon as the truck slowed, abandoned his hat on the seat and his lunch cooler in the bed, too busy running for the locker room to consider what he was leaving behind.

Boyd slammed his palm against the steering wheel, stomped down so the truck shook in time to the throbbing pain in his hand. “Fuck,” he hissed, dragging his other hand through his hair and yanking hard enough to rip it out. “ _Fuck_!”

You’ll fall in love, his mama had promised, with someone beautiful, with someone perfect. His mama had neglected to mention that falling was easy — Raylan’s head on Boyd’s shoulder, hair tickling Boyd’s neck, eyelids twitching as he dreamed and Boyd’s heart fit to burst out of his chest, pounding so he could barely breathe — but trying to love someone like Raylan was damned exhausting.

Of course, his mama never could have predicted Raylan.

Boyd sighed and climbed out of the truck, snagging the cooler from the back as he went. He should have kept his damn mouth shut. Maybe he didn’t know Raylan from nape to nails like he’d thought — the Raylan that Boyd had known would never beg to be fucked, not in Boyd’s wildest fantasies — but he knew better than to spout romance at Raylan like the boy was soft curves and sticky lip gloss instead of gasoline and rusted shrapnel in a can.

Raylan had made it plenty clear that he didn’t want Boyd’s poetry or his chivalry or any declarations of loving intent. Boyd could shut his mouth, and Raylan would keep kissing him in the truck and riding him at the cabin. Or he could open it, say the wrong damn thing, and watch Raylan walk away.

* * *

“This has been the longest eight goddamned hours of my life!” Boyd wailed, flopping against the wall and knocking his hardhat sideways on his head.

Raylan nudged him in the leg with his dirty boot. “Get up, you lazy son of a bitch,” he replied, shouting to be heard over the clatter of the coal cars and drone of the machines, the banging of the roof bolters working around them. “You’re just cranky because we didn’t need a powder man this shift. Now help me move the electric shovels over to the other wall.” He lowered his voice, leaning close to Boyd’s ear. “Then we can get out of here, find some firewood, and blow up that dynamite I know you stole.”

Boyd groaned and rolled onto his feet, hunching forward automatically even though they’d just spent eight hours digging out the room to put the ceiling higher than their heads. Alf and the other bolters were shoring up the roof with hydraulic hand drills that took both hands to hoist into the air, wielding foot-long steel bits spinning like samurai swords, sharp enough to slice through stone. The rest of them were tidying up for the incoming shift while Briggs ranted about respirators and safety equipment and dying of black lung like their daddies if they ignored him and kept breathing dust.

“I’ll race you across the room,” Boyd challenged Raylan, jogging a few steps forward before twisting to look over his shoulder, hoping to goad Raylan into sauntering a little faster, finishing as quickly as they could and maybe reaching the cabin before dawn.

Raylan’s petulant scowl was the brightest thing in the dim tunnel. It was highlighted by the sheen of sweat on his cheeks, the coal dust streaked around his eyes like grease paint, the white flash of his teeth when he couldn’t help but smile at Boyd instead. Raylan’s smile was even better than his scowl, gleaming teeth and sparkling eyes and –

And the glitter of the whirring, deadly bit of Alf's drill when it jolted out of his hands, arcing sideways, spinning, sharpened steel headed straight for Raylan.

“Givens!”

It was Alf, who did the shouting. Boyd didn’t waste his breath. Knocked it right out of his own chest, when he lunged across the room and took Raylan down in a flying tackle that would have made Bowman proud, slammed them hard into the uneven rock floor.

The drill hit the ground behind them with an echoing thud and the harsh screech of metal scraping stone. Metal that would have sunk deep into Raylan’s fragile, defenseless flesh and drawn blood, bit into bone.

Like hell it would have. Like _hell_ Boyd would allow anything but his teeth to mark Raylan’s skin.

“All right, Raylan?” Boyd couldn’t stop asking, a needle caught in a record’s groove. He ran his grimy hands over Raylan’s shoulders, down the sleeves of his blue coveralls, pressed his fingers to the pulse in Raylan’s wrist. “Are you all right?”

“Ow,” wheezed Raylan, wincing when Boyd shifted his weight off Raylan’s heaving chest. “ _Fuck_.”

“What the hell was that, Napier?” the foreman bellowed, stalking towards Alf to give the bolter a piece of his mind.

Boyd was closer, though. Boyd was close enough to smell Napier’s cloying remorse; it wound around his string of babbled apologies when Boyd came up behind him. He was close enough to lap Alf’s acrid fear from the air once he caught a glimpse of the crimson haze in Boyd’s eyes, the razor edges of his alpha teeth.

“Crowder, stand down! _Crowder_!”

Briggs sounded far away, his voice buried beneath the shriek of the fallen drill and the depth charges detonating in Boyd’s chest.

The wet crack of Alf’s nose shattering under Boyd’s fist, though — that Boyd could hear perfectly, clearer than the first chords of his favorite song on the radio. He could taste Napier’s blood in the fetid air of the mine, could hear him swear it was an accident, that he was sorry, and Jesus H. Christ, Boyd, it’s not like Raylan got hurt.

“That’s enough!” Briggs hollered, like he agreed with Alf, like he believed that one broken nose could possibly serve as recompense for causing Raylan harm.

Boyd growled deep in his chest. He shoved Napier against the bolt machine when the other man tried to run. Kneed him in the gut when the man thought he could bring his arms up to protect his face. Like hell Boyd would leave even an inch of Napier’s skin unbloodied, once he was through.

The second punch knocked Napier’s front teeth loose. The third broke his jaw, sent him reeling into the machine and begging for his life, his pleas flecked with blood. The fourth snapped his cheekbone and the fifth never landed, stopped short by one long-fingered hand splayed over Boyd’s cocked fist and a familiar stranglehold around his neck.

“Stand _down_ , you fucking asshole,” Raylan hissed, his mouth mashed against Boyd’s ear, his voice a gelid sedative poured over Boyd’s heated skin, icy as an alpha’s command. “Before I make you,” he added, lips curling back from his teeth in a sneer that promised pain if Boyd didn’t obey.

Raylan’s aggressive tone sliced through the haze in Boyd’s mind. His omega was furious, was threatening to start a fight — and those were two sure signs that Raylan was fine and all was right in Boyd’s world.

“Raylan.” Boyd lisped Raylan’s name around his retracting teeth. He slumped into Raylan’s choking embrace, his fist slipping out of Raylan’s sweaty grip to fall limply to his side.

Only that wasn’t sweat, Boyd realized, as Raylan pulled them backwards in a stumbling retreat, tripped over a shovel and landed them both on the stone floor. That was Alf’s blood on Boyd’s face and his clothes and their hands.

Ronnie and one of the other cutters had Napier’s arms slung over their shoulders, ferrying him over to the coal cars. Everyone else on the crew had their mouths hanging open and their eyes round as dinner plates, staring at Boyd the way Harlan folks stared at his daddy when he came to collect on their debts.

“Shit.” Briggs squatted against the roof-bolting machine where Boyd had tossed Napier, rubbing both hands over his face, looking worse than he had last week when his oldest girl had been suspended from school. “You got your boy back on a leash, Givens, or do I need to find you some chain?”

It was nothing the foreman hadn’t said before — _Don’t you let that boy off his leash, now_ — but he’d always been joking. He’d always been joking with _Boyd_ , because everyone knew that Crowder was the levelheaded one and Givens was the one inclined to pick up a bat and go off the goddamn rails in the fifth inning of a championship game.

Briggs wasn’t joking now.

“I’ve got him.” Boyd could feel Raylan inhale, before he spoke, the rumble in his throat where Boyd’s head rested, tucked between Raylan’s shoulder and his neck.

Boyd stretched out his right hand, flexed his fingers and watched Napier’s blood shine black under the lights. He didn’t speak up in his own defense, and the furrows on Briggs’s forehead deepened, faced with Boyd Crowder silent for the first time.

“You boys should go home. Now.” Briggs pushed himself onto his feet, refused to look at Boyd. He gestured them toward the coal cars, then waved a weary hand at the rest of the men. “And all you fuckers, what are you doing standing here chewing cud? Get to work, and maybe I’ll let you go home, too.”

“Don’t do anything stupid,” Raylan whispered, his breath cool against Boyd’s sweat-damp skin.

He stood up and Boyd followed, docile as a lamb, putting himself between Raylan and the crew. No one would hurt Raylan. No one would mark him. No one should even be _looking_ at him.

A snarl rumbled deep in Boyd’s chest, his hands curling back into fists, his blood still singing with battle cries.

Raylan jammed a pointy elbow in Boyd’s ribs, and the snarl was lost in Boyd’s pained groan.

“He can’t be doing shit like this,” Briggs told Raylan, escorting them to the coal cars, talking to Raylan like Raylan was Boyd’s daddy and Boyd was a pup nipping the other kids at school. “Not that you can either, Givens.” Briggs leveled a stern look at Raylan and Boyd bared his teeth, prompting Briggs to take a step back and soften his voice. Briggs didn't get to chastise Raylan. Raylan belonged to  _Boyd_. “But at least when you do it, it don’t come as a shock.”

It wasn’t true, that Boyd never fought. Rumor in Harlan had it that Boyd Crowder had never thrown a punch, that he grinned and snapped his fingers at his ever-present henchman, and didn’t deign to bloody his own hands. Rumor would no doubt have it differently, after today.

Like every other poor boy in Harlan, Boyd had found himself in any number of physical altercations. Occasionally, he even instigated them, although — unlike _some_ people — he was a quicker draw with his words. But Boyd’s occasional scuffles faded into insignificance next to Raylan’s scarred knuckles. Boys saw Raylan loping down the street, his hat tugged low and his hands loose at his sides — fists holstered, but a round in the chamber and ready to fire — and they dropped into a boxer’s crouch, or they got out of his way.

Everyone in Harlan knew that Raylan was his daddy’s son, a beta with an alpha’s temper. It was no wonder he and the Crowder boy ran in their own misfit pack: the beta acting like he had a knot, the alpha wheedling his way out of fights like a bitch.

He could feel Raylan’s displeasure running like an electric current through the air, the touch of an exposed wire to raw skin. Boyd had never fought for Raylan. He’d never even considered it. Raylan would have killed him, if he’d tried; or he’d never have spoken to Boyd again, which would have been far worse.

Boyd wasn’t certain what had changed. Hulking Homer Jones could threaten to smash in Raylan’s face after homeroom and Boyd would lean against the lockers and take bets on the fight, but Alf Napier dropped a drill and Boyd went feral as one of those cannibal alphas lurking in the hills.

“Get some sleep,” Briggs advised, and if that was his fatherly cure-all for fighting it was no wonder his daughter had been suspended from school. “We’ll see you assholes next week.” He banged a hand against the side of the coal car and sent them trundling on their way, out of the mountain.

Once Boyd was certain they didn’t have an audience, he rested a hand on Raylan’s sleeve. “Raylan,” he said tentatively, then stalled. He could apologize, but he didn’t make a habit of lying to Raylan. (Whether or not Raylan always _believed_ him was a different matter, and a far more frustrating one. Like the rest of Harlan, Raylan believed a lot of things that weren’t true, and disbelieved too many that were.)

“Shut up,” Raylan bit out, shaking off Boyd’s hand. “We’ll talk in the truck.”

There was no saying anything, after that, not with Raylan’s pronouncement chilling the air between them, a bitter wind out of the north. They took the elevator up in silence, changed into their jackets and jeans. Raylan scrubbed the coal dust out of his ears while Boyd dyed the water pink with the blood on his hands.

They trudged through the dark to the truck, the only sound the hum of the floodlights outside the front office and the crackle of their boots stomping over frozen grass and mud.

“You want to go home?” Boyd asked roughly, once they’d settled into the truck and he’d revved the engine in a futile effort to hurry warm air through the vents.

They’d planned to head straight up to the cabin after work, impatient after weeks with no place but the field to call their own. But Raylan’s tense shoulders and the furious lines around his mouth suggested that he’d revised those plans, and was instead contemplating evicting Boyd from his own truck and leaving him to freeze in the mine's parking lot.

“No,” Raylan replied shortly, and Boyd’s eyebrows shot up, telegraphing his surprise. “I do not. What I want is for you to get us out of this fucking parking lot. _Now_ ,” he commanded, when Boyd wasn’t quick enough shifting into drive.

They drove past Rella’s diner without stopping, though Raylan usually insisted on breakfast, eating more than his fair share of the bacon no matter how many times Boyd threatened to stab him with his fork. They passed the gas station and Boyd pulled in without asking, because if they were headed to the cabin they’d need food, and Delray sold bundles of firewood out of the back.

Boyd loaded the wood while Raylan went in for the food. He came back out with the powdered doughnuts Boyd hated and his least favorite jerky from the jar.

“Am I doing penance, Raylan?” he wondered, popping a doughnut into his mouth, sugar dusting his fingers and his lips. Raylan might have demanded silence, but all Harlan knew Boyd Crowder couldn’t keep his mouth shut if there was a gun to his head. “If so, I would like to know when you decided that hitting a man was a sin, and not simply a refreshing start to your day?”

“I don’t hit people who ain’t done nothing wrong!” Raylan lunged at Boyd, shoved the heel of his hand into Boyd’s shoulder, knocked him back against the seat.

“Bullshit,” Boyd declared, spewing powdered sugar and doughnut crumbs. “You slugged Billy Vaughn last week when he tried to keep you from breaking his cousin’s nose. Why, you picked a fight with Monroe junior year for being too stupid to work the keg up at the lake. And let us not forget –”

“Alf made one goddamn mistake,” Raylan shouted, interrupting Boyd before he could reel off the other few hundred names on that list. “One! And that gave you the right to put him in the fucking hospital?”

“It sure as hell did,” Boyd growled. “He could have killed you.”

“And so what if he had?” Raylan demanded, lifting off the seat so that he loomed over Boyd, his baseball cap brushing the ceiling of the truck.

 _Raylan Givens, 1970-1989._ Raylan gone, nothing left but cooling blood and pale skin, his fiery eyes dulled, the fierce scowl washed from his slack face. Raylan _gone._ Boyd would’ve brought the whole damn mountain down on their heads.

“I’d have killed him,” Boyd said flatly. “That is my legal _right_ , as your –”

“As my what?” Raylan’s eyes flashed. “I don't belong to you.”

Raylan’s palm was still pressed to Boyd’s chest. He felt Boyd’s flinch and shook his head, but the fury drained out of his face. “You don't own me, Boyd.” Raylan tipped his head to one side, then the other, as though Boyd wasn’t already agonizingly aware that there was nothing there but pale, unscarred skin. “You'd best get that through your thick head now," he finished, gentler than he'd begun, the whirlwind of his anger blown through and gone.

“That’s not how it is,” Boyd argued, a weak defense. He didn't make a habit of lying to Raylan, but he also didn't make a habit of attempting to tear out a man's throat for dropping his tools.

And it didn't matter, anyways, because Raylan knew every line of Boyd's face in the daylight and in the pitch dark of the mine, knew what Boyd was thinking before it ever came to mind.

“If that ain’t how it is, then why’d you go after Napier?” Raylan asked, as if he'd known all along that one day Boyd would try to bare his teeth and growl out a claim. As if he'd already forgiven him for it — and he must have, because Raylan dug through the gas station bags and extracted a package of chocolate doughnuts, the glazed ones Boyd liked best, absolution doled out in pre-wrapped baked goods. He had read Boyd's face in the mine yet agreed to come to the cabin, forgave Boyd's violence easier than he'd forgiven the romantic nonsense Boyd had spouted earlier that night. "I know it ain't in your nature, Boyd, but try not to act like an asshole just because you're fond of mine. Now start driving, before Delray comes out to see why we're still here."

Boyd grinned and pulled onto the road. Raylan wasn't running away, and he wasn't planning to break Boyd's nose for hitting Alf. He refused to belong to anyone, sure, but that was Raylan striking out at Arlo, seeing his daddy's jaws snapping closed around Frances’s delicate throat, cutting off her air and forcing her to her knees. That wasn't about Boyd.

Clary Crowder had been right about a lot of things: about how truly atrocious Aunt Betty’s biscuits were, how Bowman would be his daddy’s spitting image inside and out. She’d been right about Boyd’s heart, about the butterflies, about the _knowing_ , even if she’d expected Raylan to be a petite girl with blond hair and blue eyes and not a lanky, pugnacious boy. Of course, Boyd’s mama had also promised that Boyd was easy to love. That he was impossible to resist, that no girl in her right mind would even try. And Raylan Givens was certainly no girl — he didn't want to hear Boyd's sonnets and panegyrics, would sooner sock Boyd than allow him near his neck — but he was still sitting in Boyd's truck despite that, with chocolate doughnuts and the promise of a weekend to themselves. Boyd specialized in the impossible; given enough time, maybe he could make all his mama's predictions come true.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Have a very short interlude out of chapter-breakdown necessity, for Christmas. (Theirs, not mine.)

When Raylan woke up — he’d set his alarm for noon, needed to get up to the field before the sun went down — the house smelled better than Rella’s cafe at the end of a long shift: breads and pies and the rich scent of chocolate simmering on the stove for the candy Aunt Helen would make and hand out to the neighbors when they went visiting the next day.

Raylan stayed in bed a few more moments, luxuriating in the warmth of his covers and the promise of snow in the lowering clouds visible through his newly installed window pane. Christmas Eve smelled like heaven must. At least, it did in the Givens household. Raylan suspected that with Boyd’s aunts in the kitchen, Christmas Eve at the Crowders’ smelled like burnt sugar and charred meat.

He rolled out of bed, grateful for the heat wafting up from the kitchen into his room. There were frost crystals on the window, climbing like vines up the glass, and when Raylan walked over to his dresser he could feel the cold air pouring like a waterfall down the window and onto the floor. Boyd would be freezing, at the field, even with the heat cranked up in his truck.

Raylan smiled. There were other ways to warm Boyd up. He could stop at the gas station in town, buy some coffee and add too much sugar so it was just how Boyd liked. Tell Boyd that coffee was the only Christmas gift Raylan had brought him, and watch his face fall.

The shower took long enough to heat up that Raylan considered skipping it in favor of another layer of deodorant and some aftershave. Boyd hated the aftershave, though. He claimed it reeked worse than the methane gas in the mines, and Raylan didn’t particularly fancy listening to Boyd’s bellyaching when he was hoping to get laid. Not that they had time to drive up to one of the cabins, not with family dinners and neighbors and visiting, but if they left the engine running and the heat on maybe Raylan could let Boyd persuade him to spend what time they did have exchanging a little more than gifts.

A tepid shower wasn’t the worst thing in the world, Raylan decided, cringing as he stepped into the tub. It would warm up while he scrubbed off the coal dust — and scrubbed a few other places where Boyd might want to stick his tongue.

“Good morning, ladies,” he proclaimed, sliding down the banister and swinging into the kitchen, snatching a freshly frosted sugar cookie from the cooling rack. “I don’t believe I have ever encountered a more enticing array of delicacies,” he continued, licking the crumbs off his upper lip.

Helen slapped at his hand with her frosting knife. “Those are for the Randolphs,” she chastised him. “And why are you talking like you’re high?”

Raylan snorted and stole a chocolate-covered pretzel, exchanging a look with his mother. “It ain’t drugs, Helen,” Frances Givens explained, wiping her hands off on her floury apron. “It’s Boyd Crowder putting the Devil in Raylan’s mouth.”

_That ain’t all he puts in my mouth_ , Raylan thought, swallowed his smirk and choked on the pretzel. _And you should see what I fit in his._

Aunt Helen hummed and folded her arms, keen eyes reading whatever she found on Raylan’s face. “Better not talk like that where your daddy can hear,” she warned, as if that were something Raylan needed to be told. “He don’t much care for –”

“Crowders?” Raylan finished, arching an eyebrow instead of ducking his head like a castigated little boy. “That why he’s out with Bo now?”

“- you sounding like you’re better’n him and everything else in this county,” Helen continued, as though Raylan’s voice had been nothing but a particularly loud branch scratching on a windowpane.

Raylan met her gaze squarely, rolled his shoulders and shoved his hands into his pockets. “You want me to pretend I ain’t?” he challenged, leaning back and daring her to respond. Helen had never learned to mind her tongue — Arlo said Frances’s tongue had been even sharper, when he’d taken her in hand, but even a stupid bitch could be trained if you hit her hard enough. (Arlo was wrong, of course. He’d never managed to beat the backtalk out of Raylan; but then, he didn’t realize how much of a bitch his only son was.)

Helen cocked her head and ran a calculating gaze from Raylan’s unbuttoned flannel shirt to his unlaced sneakers. “You ain’t _pretending_ much, I suppose. You planning to walk the mountains, in those shoes, or just the ridge?”

Raylan folded his arms, pulled the flannel across his chest. It hadn’t snowed more than an inch, so far, Christmas Eve flurries twirling through the breeze and melting on the roads. Anyone in Harlan might choose to shrug on a button-down shirt instead of a sweater, or to forego winter boots for simpler shoes.

Besides, Aunt Helen had the wrong end of the stick, same as Arlo, same as everyone else. Raylan hadn’t left his shirt unbuttoned so he could take some piece of pussy up to the ridge and let her drag her fake nails down his chest. The flannel would keep Boyd warm, once Raylan wrestled him out of whatever damned turtleneck he’d decided to wear. Boyd was the only alpha in the world who could shiver his way straight through sex. And the sneakers, well, no way Aunt Helen would suspect that Raylan kept them loose to kick them off, needed his feet bare so Boyd could peel his jeans off and bury his head between Raylan’s spread legs.

Helen might lament Raylan’s friendship with Boyd — she could join in with their daddies, everybody unhappy except for Frances, the only person in Harlan who looked at Boyd and saw his late, sainted mama instead — but she couldn’t know there was more to it than that. After all, she’d have far worse to say if she suspected her sister had raised a faggot for a son, and she’d certainly never consider that Raylan might not be the beta that he seemed.

Far as Raylan could tell, even his mama had tried to forget about Raylan’s status, soon as he could drive to the clinic himself.

“I’m going out,” Raylan told his aunt, grinning like a shark and letting her draw whatever conclusions she wished. “Who’s to say where my travels will take me?”

“You go where you please, boy.” Raylan’s mama waved one slim, frosting-stained hand at him, turning up her cheek for a kiss as she shooed him out the door. “Long as you’re home in time for supper.”

“Wouldn’t miss it,” Raylan promised, flipping his coat off the hook and shuffling out the door to keep his unlaced sneakers on his feet. If he cut through the Morgans’ land after hitting the gas station at the far end of town, he could make it up to the field while the coffee was still hot.

 

The Morgans’ land was filled with their goddamned cows. The goddamned cows had laid across the dirt road, and when Raylan swerved into the field, it became clear they’d also stomped holes into the frozen ground. Raylan had kept Boyd’s coffee in his hand, to protect it, which left his coffee tucked between his thighs. Or what was left of his coffee. Most of it had spilled over his lap. He planned to make Boyd lick the coffee off every pink, scalded inch of skin, once he finished complaining about the motherfucking cows.

Boyd leaped out of his truck as soon as Raylan pulled into the field, wool cap pulled low over his ears, face tucked into the upturned collar of his daddy’s old canvas coat. He had a paper bag crumpled in one hand — the same wrapping paper Raylan had used for Boyd’s Christmas gifts, that bag wedged between the windshield and the cracked dash.

“Where the hell you been, son?” Boyd clamored, letting himself and a gust of frigid air into the tropical interior of Raylan’s truck, crawling across the seat to press his reddened face against Raylan’s neck. “I nearly died of frostbite, waiting on your sorry ass.”

“And I nearly died in the Morgans’ back forty, trying to bring you a hot fucking coffee.” Raylan nudged Boyd’s coffee into the hand he’d curled around the edge of Raylan’s shirt. “So drink this fast, ‘cause I ain’t letting you put that tongue on me till it’s warm.”

“Oh, you ain’t?” Boyd grinned, a shift of lips and the flat of his teeth on Raylan’s neck.

Raylan shivered — Boyd’s teeth were too close to his throat, the blood pounding through his jugular and his skin sensitive to the rasp of Boyd’s stubble, desperate to surrender to the bite — but he didn’t push Boyd away.

Raylan should have pushed Boyd away years ago, the first time Boyd waited for Raylan in the halls, swaggered into Raylan’s space like he belonged and threw a scrawny arm around Raylan’s neck. It was too late, now. Maybe it had been too late all along.

“I bet I could convince you otherwise,” he murmured, cool tongue swiping at Raylan’s overheated skin. Then Boyd straightened up and took the coffee, pulling off the lid and putting his face into the steam curling out of the cup, inhaling deeply with his eyes closed and his parted lips curved in a faint, appreciative smile. “Raylan, I do believe you are the finest girlfriend a man could ask for.” Boyd lifted the coffee to his mouth, and winked.

“I ain’t your girlfriend, you asshole.” Boyd stopped gulping down hot coffee, pale brown eyes sparkling, but Raylan cut him off before he could speak. “I ain’t your boyfriend, neither. Or your honey bear, or your darling, or –”

“My little bunny rabbit?” Boyd interjected, smirking, a milky line of coffee above his upper lip. “My cherry pie?”

“I am going to dump your body here,” Raylan threatened, stealing Boyd’s coffee and draining it, wincing at the mouth full of sugar he got. “Leave you for the vultures to eat.”

“Am I upsetting you, _baby_?” Boyd grinned, leaning in so that Raylan could see the gold dust dancing in his eyes. “My dear, ferocious wildcat.”

“Shut your mouth, boy.” He blew the words against Boyd’s red cheek, tilting his head to fit his mouth to Boyd’s. “Or I’ll shut it for you.”

“The hell do you think I’ve been waiting for?” Boyd retorted, but his raillery melted into a moan, drawn out of his mouth by Raylan’s eager tongue.

Boyd was skinny enough to slip between Raylan and the steering wheel, to swing one knee over Raylan’s legs and settle onto Raylan’s coffee-stained lap without breaking the kiss.

“C’mere.” He nipped the command into Boyd’s bottom lip, as though the other boy wasn’t already pressed close as he could get, lighting up all the nerves in Raylan’s body: Boyd’s tongue in Raylan’s mouth, one hand curled proprietarily around the back of his neck, thumb stroking through the short strands of Raylan’s hair. He shivered, the brush of Boyd’s thumb the flick of a lighter at the end of a fuse, burning down Raylan’s spine, curling around his chest and tightening his nipples, dynamite charges exploding low in Raylan’s gut.

Raylan slid his thumbs through Boyd’s belt loops, wrapped his hands around Boyd’s hips and dug his fingertips into Boyd’s ass, his grip bruising even through the back pockets of the jeans. Boyd groaned into Raylan’s mouth. He let Raylan drag his hips down till their belt buckles knocked together and Boyd could grind his dick against Raylan's. Raylan shifted forward, holding on Boyd’s slender hips, unwilling to move his hands long enough to unbutton Boyd’s jeans.

Boyd tossed his head back, and Raylan scraped his dull omega teeth down the line of Boyd’s neck. He picked a spot above those high collars Boyd wore to lay his claim, sucking a bruise onto the pale skin for all Harlan to see, warning them away. _Property of Raylan Givens_ , he wrote with his teeth and the tip of his tongue, with the splay of his fingers over Boyd’s ass. Bitches could come sniffing around Boyd at the diner, or sashay up to the truck swinging their hips and pushing their tits through the window, hoping to distract Boyd from his hamburgers and books. Raylan would show those desperate girls that Boyd Crowder belonged to _him_.

“Boyd,” Raylan moaned, a few minutes or an eternity later. They’d fogged up the windows of the truck. They’d left the heat on, which meant Raylan was shirtless, sweat pooling above his collarbone and sticking his back to the leather seat, and Boyd was wearing Raylan’s flannel shirt and warming his cold fingers against Raylan’s overheated skin. Raylan pinned Boyd’s hips, rutted up into the vee of his thighs, but he needed more than that — he’d soaked through his boxers ages ago, wet and open and desperate for Boyd’s mouth or his cock. “Boyd, you gotta move.”

Boyd grunted a refusal, both hands holding Raylan’s face captive so he could kiss him stupid, his hips rocking helplessly in Raylan’s iron grip.

“If we stay like this,” Raylan panted, when Boyd let him up for air, “I’m gonna have to fuck you, you jackass.”

He tilted his head up, expecting another onslaught of alpha teeth and tongue, but Boyd leaned away from Raylan, his fingers tightening on Raylan’s jaw.

“What?” Raylan wondered, straining up for a kiss until he caught sight of Boyd’s frown, thick eyebrows drawn low over his dark eyes. “What is it?”

Boyd cocked his head, studying Raylan with eyes blown black, pursing his swollen lips. “Is that something you’re wanting, Raylan?”

His voice sounded like sex, gravelly and breathless and going straight to Raylan’s cock like it had for years, listening through the rear windshield for _Fuck, you’re so wet, baby, you gonna come for me, you gonna come on my dick?_

But Boyd was frowning, which meant he expected Raylan to answer the question and not beg to be stuffed full of Boyd’s thick alpha dick.

The question seemed stupid, though. Of course Raylan wanted to have sex. That was why they’d come up to the field, wasn’t it? But sex didn’t make Boyd nervous — not after the first time, eyes wide and anxious until he’d buried his tongue in Raylan’s ass and lost his nerves in the rush of pheromones and slick — so Raylan must have said something else, trying to get Boyd off his lap and out of his pants.

_If we stay like this, I’m gonna have to fuck you_.

Oh. Raylan narrowed his eyes, studying the jut of Boyd’s square chin, the way he tried to hold Raylan’s gaze, but kept looking at his forehead, or the bridge of his nose, pupils contracting fast at the thought of Raylan sliding his omega dick up Boyd’s dry hole. It was no wonder Boyd’s ass cheeks were clenching under Raylan’s hands, hoping to screw his asshole shut in lieu of telling Raylan no.

Because Boyd couldn’t say no, not if Raylan asked.

They hadn’t talked about it, exactly. They hadn’t talked about any of it. Boyd had tried, at first, but Raylan could sense it coming, had spent years learning a million ways to shut Boyd Crowder’s mouth, kissing just the latest and best of the lot.

_Stop that,_ Boyd had demanded, in those first days when Raylan would remember who they were and what they were doing, kissing in Boyd’s truck, and wrench away. Boyd had growled without any force behind it, nothing compelling Raylan to obey except the desire to please one arrogant hillbilly boy. _You want to put me on my knees, Raylan? Will that forestall your many and varied attempts to run out on a perfectly agreeable evening?_

_You don’t want that_. Raylan wasn’t a fool. Boyd wanted Raylan just how he had him, on his back, kissed senseless and dripping slick in the cab of Boyd’s truck. Boyd dated beta girls, but everybody knew he preferred omega cunt — all the boys did — and he had to have been thrilled beyond measure to find one on Raylan, no matter how well he pretended not to care.

_Christ, you moron, I blew my knot for you when I thought you were a beta with an attitude problem. If I had ever dared to imagine this –_

Raylan had kissed him, then, to lick Boyd’s mouth clean of the thought that there could have been any dreaming of this, before he knew the truth about Raylan. Boyd wasn’t a faggot. He was just knotblown for Raylan’s omega ass, that was all. Raylan had crippled men for suggesting Boyd could be anything less.

– _I never expected you to be the one on your back. Raylan, are you listening to me?_

Raylan always listened to Boyd. Of course, there was listening to the bullshit coming out of his mouth and there was listening to the tic in his jaw, the taut lines of his neck and the shutters slamming shut across his eyes.

In those first days, it hadn’t sunk too far in, precisely what Raylan’s designation changed for them. Boyd had _known_ it, but it hadn’t settled into his muscles and his bones, had yet to weigh down his ball sack or fill his knot. But at some point between that first evening out — their first date, Boyd said, but that was stupid, they’d been going to the movies for years — and now, Boyd’s attitude had changed.

Maybe it had been during that first incredible blow job, Boyd’s nose buried in Raylan’s pubes, all of his senses surrounded by the taste and scent that the suppressants couldn’t quite hide. Maybe it was the fifth date, or the second trip up to the cabin, or the moment where Raylan had demanded that Boyd fuck him harder, clamped his thighs around Boyd’s waist and begged for his knot. It could have been any of those times. They were months past the conversation where Boyd had offered himself up, and somewhere along the line, Raylan’s status as omega had gone from abstract fact to fundamental law.

_Is that something you’re wanting, Raylan?_

He almost said “yes,” to see what Boyd would do, how he would react to Raylan’s leaking cock stretching open his alpha asshole and perverting the natural order of things. But Raylan had been planning Christmas Eve for weeks: he had checked the schedule with Briggs, checked with Boyd to make certain that Crowder family obligations wouldn’t intrude on their day.

Raylan had even driven them both up to Lexington last weekend — hell if he’d let Boyd drive, now that the roads had a scattered coating of black ice — and left Boyd in raptures at the bookstore while he went and bought Aunt Helen a new VCR. He might have bought a car stereo with a cassette player, while he was there. It was one of the new ones that could play both sides of a tape, something to replace the old radio in Boyd’s truck that played more static than song. He’d hidden it under the seat, where Boyd wouldn’t find it and ruin the surprise, dragged the boy down to the music store to buy cassettes, the soft rock and local dirges Boyd favored.

Raylan had planned for this. He had showered for this. He was aching for something besides a fight, wanted Boyd wrapped in his flannel and wrapped around him, wanted his knot.

It was easier than it should have been, to shake his head no.

He leaned in and bit a line of messy kisses up Boyd’s tensed jaw, caught his earlobe between his front teeth and made Boyd shudder when he tugged. “What I’m _wanting_ ,” he whispered, mimicking Boyd’s question, breathing the answer into Boyd’s reddened ear. “What I’m wanting is for you to move your ass, so’s you can stick your dick in mine.”

Raylan’s daddy had tried to beat the fight out of Raylan, and instead he’d beaten out his son’s willingness to plead for mercy, made it so Raylan would keep swinging when he should have stayed down. And yet — and yet, there was Raylan, under a boy and begging to be fucked, giving in when he could have stood his ground. Boyd always was the exception to every one of Raylan’s rules.

“You’re gon’ be the death of me, boy.” Boyd arched into Raylan’s nipping kisses and groaned, rocking his hips hard against Raylan’s cock. Then he twisted off Raylan's lap, lissome as a river snake, the effect ruined when he bumped his elbow into the horn and made them both jump. He hauled Raylan sideways with surprising strength, shoved him down onto the seat.

“Best Christmas present yet,” he purred, dragging his cool hands along the planes of Raylan’s bare chest, following the trail with his tongue and dropping his fingers to Raylan’s belt.

“Please,” Raylan whined, rutting up into Boyd’s clever hands, erection straining against his zipper, his hole clenching, desperate for Boyd’s alpha cock. “Fuck, Boyd, fuck me, _please_.”

Raylan Givens didn’t beg. Not for anyone. (Not for anyone but Boyd.)


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a direct continuation of chapter 11, so I suppose you could think of it as one long chapter. I hope you enjoy it (or at least, don't want to kill me)!

“You ever think about leaving?” Raylan asked, because of course Raylan would choose to ruin a perfectly good afterglow.

He also nicked Boyd’s cigarette, despite kicking up a fuss when Boyd snagged his jeans off the floor and tugged out the pack. He’d listed the horrible shit nicotine and tar would do before reiterating the myriad ways they would die from black lung and coal slabs before the tobacco could strike them dead.

Raylan had a knack for looking on the bright side of things.

“Do you?” Boyd retorted, stealing the cigarette back and taking a long drag. He reached over his head to slide the cigarette out the cracked window and tap off the ash, his back pressed uncomfortably against the handle on the passenger side door, Raylan resting against his chest.

“As it stands, you ain’t seen fit to regale me with any of your picaresque plans since ...” Since May, when Raylan had swung at Dickie Bennett and shattered his stadium-light dreams. “For a few months, at least.”

They didn’t talk about May. They didn’t talk about June, either, the weeks Boyd had pleaded with Raylan’s unresponsive bedroom door and feared that he’d lost his best friend. _1989_ , the year Boyd had almost lost Raylan to baseball twice. The year he was spending Christmas Eve with everything he’d ever wanted — more than he could have dreamed of — in his arms.

“’Course I do.” Raylan jabbed his nose into Boyd’s neck, nibbling at a fading hickey. Raylan liked leaving marks for folks to ogle at. He laid a claim every time he got Boyd in the dark of the truck, though he flinched away whenever Boyd attempted to reciprocate. “I’m not staying here to die in the mines.”

Boyd sighed, exhaling smoke into Raylan’s mussed hair. He could scent Raylan, sometimes, despite the sups, but only like this: sated, sweat-drenched, come and slick wiped messily off of his stomach and his ass. Boyd had theorized that — like fear had done in the mines — sex knocked the suppressants sideways, or diminished their scent-dampening side effects. Raylan theorized that Boyd had nearly failed biology, and therefore was unreliable and full of shit.

“Raylan.” Boyd lingered over the syllables of Raylan’s name, pressed his nose to Raylan’s temple and his lips to the curve of Raylan’s ear. “Has it come to your attention that one can labor in the mines _without_ dying in them?”

Boyd’s beautiful, obdurate omega swiveled to push his forehead into Boyd’s, glowering cross-eyed at him through squinted amber eyes. “You mean folks like Pearl Reece’s daddy?” he retorted, angry bursts of air against Boyd’s lips.

“Now, that’s different,” Boyd protested, blinking to bring Raylan into focus with his face so close. “Vester Reece died of pneumonia, that winter in ’78 when the river froze.”

“Mmm-hmm.” Raylan hummed aggressively, Columbo about to foil a lying criminal and make his case. And here Harlan folks thought _Boyd_ was the disputatious one. “Vester, who worked thirty years in the Stanton Lee shaft and died drowning on dry land. Same as Ella Jean’s daddy died of cancer eating out his lungs –”

“That was the nicotine!” But Boyd might as well have gone mute, his objections steamrolled by Raylan’s crusade against Harlan County and the Kentucky hills.

“– and Mr. Thompson who died of lesions in his chest after selling his life to B&D Mining.”

The cigarette burned down while Boyd gathered his arguments, licked heat across the backs of his fingers. “Fuck!” Boyd winced and jerked upright, flicked the glowing cigarette butt out the window and whimpered over his singed hand. “Jesus fuck, motherfucker.”

“You’re a moron,” Raylan said, but he caught Boyd’s burned fingers and slid them into his mouth, laving the burned skin with his tongue. “Can’t even smoke a cigarette right, can you?” He pulled Boyd’s fingers out of his mouth and blew on them, a soothing stream of cool air and an indulgent half-smile that made Boyd’s breath catch and his heart race. Raylan’s affection was usually locked up tight, impossible for anyone to coax free.

“Well, all right then,” he conceded, because Raylan had just planted a kiss on Boyd’s fingertip, and Boyd was willing to grant him almost anything at that point. “It is increasingly clear to me that mining isn’t your cup of tea. But it ain’t the only career in this county.”

Raylan arched one dubious brow and kissed Boyd’s other finger. Boyd doubted Raylan realized he was doing it; he wouldn’t consciously bestow something so kind.

“Are you suggesting truck driving?” he posited, and _Christ_ , Boyd knew where that was headed, had gone to the funeral with Raylan last week. “Because that didn’t end too well for Hassell and Harvard, did it?”

The Gilliam twins, the boys who could have run the town’s only ice cream shop and made a decent living, but eschewed their daddy’s meager business earnings for the salary they brought in driving coal trucks for the mines. The Gilliam twins, who had taken the mountain pass before dawn one morning, hit a patch of black ice — black like coal, the fundament on which Harlan lived and died — and rolled off the mountainside and into their early graves.

“There’s the library?” Boyd tried. They spent a fair bit of time in the library, and Raylan sometimes got bored and re-filed the books that the staff had wedged haphazardly onto the shelves. In Harlan, Raylan’s grasp of the Dewey decimal system was tantamount to three years of experience and a college degree.

He buttoned up Raylan’s worn flannel shirt, since Raylan seemed to have decided arguing took precedent over sharing body heat. He would have dragged his boxers and jeans on, but Raylan was still sitting across his thighs, one leg tucked between Boyd’s.

“The library,” Raylan echoed, rolling his eyes. “You mean the library that’s likely to go sky high at any moment, since Mrs. Dabney’s boys are cooking meth in the basement?”

“That’s business, too.” Boyd kept his voice mild. He worked as a powder man — he had cultivated a sixth sense for unstable fuel oils, learned when to move real slow, hold his breath and hope like hell he got out before the ceiling fell in. Raylan would never forgive him, if Boyd died in the mines. Boyd would never forgive himself for making all Raylan’s darkest nightmares come true. “Pays well enough, if you do it right.”

Raylan stiffened, stark naked and prickly as a hedgehog, all his feathers fluffed. Boyd had known that charge was going to explode. Boyd might have had a sixth sense for dynamite, but his first five senses had been tuned to Raylan for a decade or more.

“You’re saying we ought to follow in our daddies’ dirty footsteps?” It might have been a question, but in Raylan’s mouth it was a denunciation, venomous fury in his light brown eyes and spittle flecking his lips.

“Boyd!” Raylan spoke shrilly, worse than their first-grade teacher with a ruler coming down on Boyd’s hands. “That ain’t an option, you hear me? You ain’t doing that.”

“Fuck, darling.” Boyd tried to gather Raylan back into his arms, ended up with a lapful of angry porcupine. “I’m digging coal, baby, what more do you want from me?”

What did Raylan think Boyd was doing, clocking over forty hours a week under a thousand feet of rock and coal? Who in Christ’s name did Raylan think Boyd was doing it _for_ , digging an honest living when there was easy family money in meth and cocaine?

“I want you out of your daddy’s goddamned house,” Raylan stipulated, relaxing into Boyd’s embrace. “And don’t call me baby, you asshole.”

“I’m beginning to suspect that you want me out of the goddamned state,” he replied coolly, and Raylan held his gaze, stuck out his jaw.

“And if I do?” he asked, wildcat eyes piercing into Boyd, his long fingers fiddling anxiously with the buttons on Boyd’s shirt. “It’s my place, ain’t it, wanting more for you than your daddy’s hillbilly empire running drugs and busting knees?”

Busting knees was more a Givens’s forte, but Boyd let that lie.

“Careful, Raylan,” he warned, curling his fingers around Raylan’s, stilling the fingers playing with loose threads in a buttonhole. “You’re talking like my mate.”

“I’m talking like your fucking _friend_ ,” Raylan spat, wrenching his hand out of Boyd’s. “You’d know that if you had any. I ain’t gonna live and die on the grave my daddy plotted,” he vowed, slapping the flat of his palm into Boyd’s chest. “Never anything more than a white trash hillbilly boy that his daddy should have drowned in the creek years ago.”

“So what is your ingenious plan?” Boyd arched his back and knocked Raylan clear off his lap, groped in the footwell for his underwear, because he wasn’t having this conversation naked from the waist down. “You think we should move to what, DC, where the city folks can laugh at our accents and treat us like trash? Is that it?”

He flung the boxers on without looking, glanced down as he was hauling up his jeans and noticed they were Raylan’s. “Is that how it goes, in this spectacular life of yours? And tell me,” he continued, fed up to his teeth with this, the ache in his chest from waiting for Raylan. Waiting for Raylan to walk away. “Is it any different for me, your perfect, fairytale life? Am I ever anything more than your _friend_ , the obedient alpha _bitch_ to your real man?”

Boyd knew the answer. He tucked his flaccid cock into Raylan’s boxers, zipped Raylan’s underwear into his jeans, and dug his fingernail into the cigarette burn on his fingertip to distract himself from watching Raylan avoid his gaze. Boyd wouldn’t beg. There was no point, when begging wouldn’t change Raylan’s mind.

“That ain’t how it is,” Raylan said, stretching one hand out to rest on Boyd’s knee, retracting it before it could touch.

But wasn’t it?

Harlan believed Boyd Crowder never finished a fight. They believed that he never dropped his teeth — that he lurked in Raylan’s shadow, too weak an alpha to take a mate.

“C’mon, Boyd, that ain’t how we are.”

“So if we moved,” Boyd pushed, juggling dynamite and a short fuse. “You’d tell folks? We’d settle someplace where we could be who we really are?”

“We _really are_ friends.” Raylan’s expressive face shut down, eyes burning hot before hardening to shards of petrified wood. “At least, we used to be. Now all you care about is sinking your goddamn fangs into my neck.”

Thirty minutes ago, Raylan had been on his hands and knees, coming on Boyd’s dick and demanding his knot, howling like a banshee when Boyd delivered, wet and hot and vise-tight around Boyd’s cock. Boyd could have stayed like that forever — careful maneuvering to flop onto the seat with Raylan boneless on his lap, languorous and sated, his head resting in the crook of Boyd’s neck, his internal muscles fluttering around Boyd’s knot in soft, endless waves of orgasm teased out by Boyd’s reverent fingers on Raylan’s sensitive skin.

And now Raylan was sitting on the far side of the bench, spitting about how they _used to be_ friends, farther away with every word and leaving Boyd cold.

“You might give me a little goddamned credit.” Boyd’s molars spiked pain into his jaw, when he ground them down. “I could have ripped your throat out months ago,” _when you begged for it_ , he didn’t say, because Boyd knew that conversation would end in blood.

But Raylan pushed his neck into Boyd’s teeth every time he came, the same silent plea he used when he clamped his thighs around Boyd’s hips and begged for his knot.

“I’m not going to bite you, Raylan.” He pinched the bridge of his nose and exhaled slow, exhausted by Raylan’s refusal to believe that Boyd wasn’t going to pin him and scar him and beat him till he obeyed. “I don’t care if I never do.”

“You’re lying,” Raylan replied, shaking his head.

He watched Boyd with a sharpshooter’s eyes, as if he could squint into the brush and see the way Boyd looked at him when they slept tangled up in blankets, on the floor of an old cabin or the bed of a truck. As if he could pluck the inchoate hopes from Boyd’s dreaming mind, nebulous visions of a future where Raylan was safe from his daddy and safe from the mines, where he wore the neat imprint of Boyd’s teeth with pride.

“This ain’t about that,” he said firmly, because Boyd might wish on shooting stars and moonlight dreams, but Raylan dealt in pragmatic options and feasibility, and Boyd’s dreams had no place in Raylan’s waking life. “You want to flee Harlan and serve hamburgers to rich folks in a big city, that’s fine.”

It wasn’t. It would crack the heart Raylan didn’t believe Boyd had put in his callused hands.

“But I ain’t abandoning this place, Raylan — this place where we were raised, the churchyard with my mama and the millpond and the ridge where I wanted to kiss you for the first time — if all you’re offering me is the chance to play the hick in four-lane traffic and neon lights.”

“Don’t be such a fucking dumb shit,” Raylan growled, snapping his teeth at Boyd’s words. “You ain’t gonna be some hillbilly, you ain’t that _now_. You’re better than this county, Boyd. We leave and you could do whatever you want, somewhere no one assumes you’re a criminal just because of your daddy’s name.”

“The difference between you and me,” Boyd told Raylan, quiet as the exhale before the trigger engaged. “Is that I am not ashamed of being a Crowder.” He wasn’t ashamed of the mines, or the churches, or the folks living on sad songs and moonshine. He wasn’t ashamed of the hills. “And I ain’t gonna leave our home just to act your _friend_ , drive twenty miles to some deserted field like this one whenever you want more, only to drive back into town and watch you flirt with girls and act like you ain’t mine.”

“I ain’t yours!” Raylan’s eyes flashed, his hand slapping hard against the seat, half an inch from Boyd’s knee. “We’ve been over this. I don’t belong to you, but that don’t mean that I’m not –”

“You do belong to me!” Boyd shouted, sick of pussyfooting around it to spare Raylan’s fragile sensibilities when it came to mates. “If you’d use your fucking nose and scent it, you’d know that. But no, anytime you catch a whiff of it you swallow another sup, too afraid to smell the goddamn truth.”

Boyd had been waiting weeks for Christmas Eve, giddy with anticipation like he hadn’t been since he was a pup waiting for Santa Claus. (Arlo had never given Raylan the chance to put his faith in Santa Claus. Bo Crowder had grinned, let his sons believe it for a few years before ripping through the veil and chortling at how easy they’d been conned.) Boyd had climbed into their spider-infested attic to find the Christmas paper his mama had always folded and saved, wasted more time wrapping Raylan’s presents than he had spent buying gifts for his kin, had even bought a fancy bottle of peach brandy for Raylan to give to his mama and Miss Helen.

He had thrown extra blankets in his truck, in case Raylan wanted to linger, in case he might consider staying in Boyd’s arms until the sun went down.

And instead, Boyd had crumpled the afternoon like garbage, thrown it away because he couldn’t keep his fucking mouth shut. He’d known how Raylan felt about mates since they’d started this — since _before_ they’d started this, since Health class where Coach Morgan had asked someone to list the advantages of the claiming bite, and Raylan had said, “You can file off manacles, or gnaw your leg off to escape a trap, but the only way out of a claiming is to cut off your head.”

It didn’t matter that scenting Raylan made Boyd dizzy, more powerful than Colombian cocaine or the Bennetts’ high-grade weed. It didn’t matter that, (if they hadn’t been a myth his mama had told him, like Santa Claus,) Raylan had always felt like Boyd’s true mate, even at ten years old in fourth grade when they were nothing but unpresented, unruly pups.

He knew Raylan better than to push him and expect anything but a fist to the face. Just once, though, Boyd wished that Raylan would pretend, for an hour or two, would allow Boyd to believe in Christmas miracles before they shattered in the bleak December cold.

“The only thing I’d smell is your bullshit,” Raylan hissed, refusing to allow Boyd a goddamn inch. And Boyd was four years old again, watching his daddy eat Santa’s cookies and laugh at the lost expression on his oldest son’s face, nothing in the stockings and no new presents under the tree. Wishes were for fools, and Santa Claus was long dead and gone.

* * *

Boyd was spouting crap. He had to be. “Patented Boyd Crowder bullshit, just like everything else you vomit up.” Raylan grabbed Boyd’s sweater from where it had gotten flung across the dashboard, because there was nothing else to wear. They’d used his undershirt to wipe themselves clean, and Boyd was wearing Raylan’s flannel shirt. “You’ll say anything, won’t you, if it means getting your way?”

That was what Arlo always said Crowders did, though Bo seemed to prefer guns and baseball bats to words, when it came to persuading folks to his point of view, and Bowman was too damn stupid to string together a complete sentence without help. But Boyd, Boyd could sell a heifer to the milkman, could smile winningly at the MSHA inspector and then break every regulation in the books and nearly bury himself in the seam.

How dare he do this to Raylan? How dare he act like a goddamn Crowder alpha, talking like he owned Raylan, lying about not wanting to lay claim to Raylan’s neck, lying about the idea that anyone could _smell_ a mate? How dare he call Raylan a coward for wanting more than Harlan, for staying on his sups?

“Any goddamned excuse to drop your alpha teeth straight into my neck, huh?” Boyd’s sweater itched, his aunt’s cheap wool and uneven stitches, too tight in the collar and loose in the sleeves. “Still hoping that if I go off my sups _you’ll_ transform from my ‘alpha bitch’ into a ‘real man’.”

Boyd flinched, turned his head to peer out the fogged windshield and flattened his lips. He inhaled like he’d caught something in his throat. Boyd never flinched when anyone else talked like that to him, never let them see the barbs sink in. Raylan would have broken their jaws, if Boyd had let him, had the hospital wire them shut so assholes like Dickie and Jimmie Louise could never talk again. But Boyd wouldn’t have it that way. Boyd didn’t want Raylan to stand up for him. No, Boyd wanted Raylan to bare his neck, wanted to prove his knot by putting the only male omega in Kentucky under his thumb.

“You just want me on my knees so you don’t have to admit that I’m a better alpha than you could ever be.” Raylan had rehearsed those words for years, desperate to spit them like bloody saliva at his daddy’s face, his mama gone to Nobles and Raylan curled around his broken arm on the floor. “You’re thinking that if you brought me to Bo, neck still bleeding, it might make you less of a disappointment to your daddy, but it won’t. Ain’t nothing gonna change Bo’s mind.”

That was Arlo talking, scowling behind Raylan’s eyelids, cursing his omega’s barren womb and his useless beta son. It was Raylan’s daddy set loose on Raylan’s tongue, thrown like a wild punch and catching Boyd square in the jaw.

_You’re nothing but a disappointment to your daddy, boy. Nothing but a bitch with teeth._

“You’re right,” Boyd said softly, picking up his wool cap and rolling it between his hands. His fingers were probably ice cold, despite the heater. Boyd never stayed warm unless he plastered all his frozen limbs against Raylan and squeezed tight. “You’re right that we used to be friends.”

He looked straight at Raylan, brittle, unbending iron in his gaze. Raylan rubbed his chest, couldn’t find air to breathe. “But we ain’t much of anything, Raylan, if you’re so convinced that I would lie to _you_.”

Raylan ran hot, his mama always said, saw the world through a fevered haze, blood boiling over at the first hint of a slight. Boyd was different. Boyd ran cold as the deepest circle of hell, burned like frozen steel and hoary air.

“We’re done here.” Boyd shoved his cap down over his messy hair, made Raylan shiver with the chill in his dark eyes.

_You just want me on my knees._

Boyd snatched his coat off the floor, and cracked open the door, letting in a gust of wintry air and a few drifting flakes of snow. He offered Raylan a smile that drooped at the corners, blue-lipped and wan.

“Good bye, Raylan,” he whispered, and stepped out into the cold.

* * *

“Fuck!”

Raylan lunged across the bench seat, wiping at the condensation on the window until he could see Boyd stamping across the snow in his unlaced boots, hunched forward to escape the wind. He wanted to charge after him — though he was wearing nothing but Boyd’s sweater and his socks — tackle him to the ground before he could drive away. But there wasn’t anything Raylan could say; he’d already said a host of things he wished he could retract, call the words back like dogs and fence them in so they couldn’t escape.

But goddammit, it wasn’t a crime, wanting there to be more in life than Harlan, Kentucky. It wasn’t a crime to want more for Boyd, who was three times as smart as anyone in the county and probably twice as smart as anyone in the state.

Ms. Tipton had seen it, despite her disdain for them, the hick kids in their third-rate high school, despite her pretentious, big-city airs. The guidance counselor had ignored Raylan beyond that first mandatory meeting, a moue of distaste on her thin lips. She’d dismissed him with the suggestion that he “stop bullying the other children, unless you want to play baseball in a prison yard.” But she kept trying to lure Boyd into her office, (until the day Boyd blew it up,) weighed him down with pamphlets for the University of Kentucky, for private schools like Duke and Vanderbilt. She believed Boyd could win scholarships just for being smart, could get folks to pay for his future without catching a ball.

But every time Raylan mentioned leaving, Boyd’s hackles raised, as though Raylan had suggested that they dig up Boyd’s moldering ancestors and toss them in the truck before hightailing it for the state line, drive to New York City and hoist them over the Empire State Building, a row of desecrated Crowder skeletons waving in the breeze.

Goddamn Boyd, talking like Raylan _shouldn’t_ be ashamed of being a Givens, like it was fine that folks eyed him sideways in the street, never looking for anything but his daddy’s temper and his mama’s weak omega will.

 _Goddamn_ Boyd, talking like there was such a thing as true mates. Every pup with a lick of sense knew that a “compatible mate” was nothing more than which alpha had the pointiest teeth and the prickliest tone of command.

If Boyd could smell something on Raylan — and he _couldn’t_ , was lying to Raylan, no matter how many times he promised he never would — then it meant that Raylan was supposed to spend his life as a Crowder bitch, nothing more than a docile, hillbilly cunt waiting on Boyd’s commands.

When Raylan was eight, Arlo had caught Frances around the neck. He’d forced her to her knees and demanded that she clean his boots with her tongue, choked her with his fingers and his commands till she complied.

Harlan was nothing but a gravestone in the yard and a future kneeling at Boyd’s feet.

It didn’t matter that Boyd hadn’t once put Raylan on his knees, until Raylan went there of his own accord. He’d only commanded Raylan once, in the school parking lot more than a year ago. Boyd dropped his teeth less than twice a year. He’d _begged_ Raylan to come out of his room in June, spent every afternoon for weeks jabbering at a closed door instead of lowering his voice and insisting that Raylan come outside. He hadn’t demanded that Raylan stop working at the mines, after Napier dropped the drill and Boyd lost his fucking mind, though he’d followed Raylan’s every move with worried eyes for the next two weeks.

Boyd was better than any alpha in the county, better than any of those liberal alphas on the TV. But Harlan would carve him down, if they stayed, whittle him to fit their expectations, leave nothing but an alpha temper and a strong hand.

Why didn’t Boyd understand that they needed to leave? That they could be _anyone_ , if they left, anyone but the poor, knee-breaking heirs to infamy that they were.

Raylan grabbed for the handle on the passenger door, determined to roll down the window and drill some sense into Boyd’s granite head. But Boyd’s truck was gone, nothing but tire tracks in the snow and mud where it had been.

_We’re done here._

_Good bye._

Raylan’s present for Boyd was still sitting on the dash, a twin to the brown bag beside it that Boyd had left behind.

Raylan hauled on Boyd’s threadbare boxers and his jeans — Boyd might come back, once he’d circled the hill, shivered off some of his anger in his cold truck and Raylan’s flannel shirt — before tugging Boyd’s Christmas gift off the dashboard, surprised at the weight of it, the chill where it rested on his knees.

Boyd had wrapped his gifts, Raylan discovered, pulling a few awkwardly papered packages out of the bag: yards of tape, and wrapping paper creased in the wrong places, used for the first time years ago and stored in the Crowder’s attic after Clary had died.

He opened the large, rectangular present first, because he had suspected for weeks that one or two of the twenty books Boyd had bought in Lexington were for him. He had worried that Boyd planned to give him _The Satanic Verses_ or _Foucault’s Pendulum_ as part of his ongoing attempt to enlighten Raylan, but thankfully Boyd seemed to have kept those particular volumes for himself. Instead, there was the new Louis L’Amour novel, just out that month, another called _Blood Brothers_ that Raylan had pointed out at the store, wondering aloud why Boyd had never offered his bloody palm to Raylan. There were two other books with cowboys, guns and horses on the covers, a perfect escape to the cattle trails and frontier towns of the Old West for when Raylan couldn’t stand one more second with his daddy in the house. These would keep Raylan reading for a month at least: two for home, one tucked in the glove compartment of his truck and one in Boyd’s, wedged under Montesquieu and above Strauss.

There was a smaller box under the books, taped on the corners and around the middle, Raylan resorting to the penknife he kept in the truck when he couldn’t make any headway with his fingernails or teeth. It was a cassette tape, the same as all the ones Raylan had put in Boyd’s bag, music for the new stereo for Boyd’s truck. Only this cassette was Motörhead. “Death to eardrums metal,” as Boyd called it, whined whenever they came on the radio until Raylan changed the station or poured hot coffee on Boyd’s lap. (He’d only done that the one time. And it had been Boyd’s coffee. Raylan wasn’t about to waste his own.)

There was black marker scrawled across the clear plastic of the cassette box, the same thorny handwriting that had graced Raylan’s English essays for years. _You think you’re subtle, darling?_ the first side read, proof that Boyd was a nosy asshole who thought he was a detective, rummaging through Raylan’s bags to find the car stereo and stalking him through the record store. Raylan smiled softly, and shook his head. It was just like Boyd, always sticking his hand in holes and hollow tree trunks despite knowing he was liable to get bit. _You suffer my music,_ he’d written on the opposite side, letters cramped to fit, _and I’ll suffer your pagan death throes._

Sometimes, when Raylan was little, Frances would tell him about the pretty omega girl he’d meet one day, about how this girl would fall hopelessly in love with him. “But what if she doesn’t like me?” Raylan had wondered, because most kids didn’t. They thought he was too poor or too mean, didn’t mind him on the baseball field but poked fun at him for being slow when he had nothing to say, didn’t laugh at his jokes when he spoke. _That’s ‘cause they’re dumb shits,_ Boyd Crowder had whispered once — walking past Raylan’s lunch table and still giggling at Raylan’s quiet joke — but it wasn’t like a Crowder had ever cornered the market on making friends.

“Of course she’ll like you,” his mama had said, ruffling Raylan’s hair without looking, chopping carrots for soup. “She’ll love everything about you.”

“Even baseball?” Raylan had asked, squinting suspiciously, because the only girl that liked baseball was Josie Allen, and she was uglier than a boy and meaner than a feral tomcat.

“Well.” His mama bent her head toward the pot, fingers white around the stained wooden handle of the spoon. “She’ll be your omega, son. She’ll like whatever you say.”

Fourteen had changed all that. There were no more stories about pretty girls; Frances Givens unprepared to spin fairytales for her freak of an omega son.

Though Raylan _had_ run through most of the omega girls in the county during high school, none of them had persuaded him to fall in love. None of them had feigned an interest in baseball. None of them had attended every practice, rain, snow, or sunshine, or quizzed their jackass cousin the pitcher about the rules so they knew when to cheer Raylan’s name. None of them always sat in the same spot, every game, so that Raylan could shield his eyes and see their wide grin and dark hair.

Omegas couldn’t force people to do anything, couldn’t bring down their fists and command.

But maybe there was something to his mama’s stories, after all: Boyd’s crappy radio tuned to the station with the best sports announcers, and a death metal cassette in Raylan’s hand.

The last package was a lumpy triangle patterned with Christmas trees and smirking reindeer, but Raylan could feel the weight of it, knew it for exactly what it was.

He pulled Bo Crowder’s old Colt revolver out of three layers of wrapping paper and what felt like two rolls of scotch tape, popped the cylinder out to make sure it wasn’t loaded before setting it back on his lap and peering at it, wondering what Boyd meant by the gift.

He noticed the engraving first, _RG_ etched into the wooden grip, curling calligraphy burned deep by a professional hand. Raylan flipped the gun over, but there was no matching carving on the other side. The note was tucked under the gun, fluttering off Raylan’s lap and onto the seat.

 _I know it ain’t the diamond earrings I promised you_ , it read, and Raylan thought of Boyd at fourteen, his scrawny arm slung over Raylan’s shoulders and his toothy grin, the only person determined to make Raylan smile on his birthday. _But I couldn’t find anything fit for your delicate ears, and I thought every nice handbag needs a gun. I had the man leave the other side blank. He wanted to carve you some spurs, but I told him you’d need the space to keep a tally of all the gunslingers you’ll outdraw._

_I couldn’t afford the fancy gun belt, Sundance, but maybe next year._

Raylan rubbed his thumb over the indentations of his initials, the sweep of the _R_ , the way its leg curled under the _G_ and around it, arcing back around in a circle like a cattle brand. Whatever Boyd had paid for the carving, it couldn’t have come as dear as the gun. Bo didn’t want the revolvers — their daddies believed in guns that any thug could wave, semiautomatics that fit an entire box of ammunition in the magazine, had no use for any weapon that required careful handling and practiced aim — but Bo had a fondness for collecting things that _other folks_ wanted, measuring their desperation to his asking price. As soon as Boyd asked for the revolvers, his daddy would develop a reluctance to give them up, Bo’s black, weasel eyes gauging his son’s eagerness, waiting to see what Boyd would give.

There was wrapping paper strewn over the bench seat, four new books and a cassette for a stereo that Raylan had bought for _Boyd_ , a monogrammed revolver prettier than any gift Raylan had ever received. And there was the brown bag with Boyd’s present, laying forgotten on top of the dashboard and damp with condensation from the glass.

Raylan needed to fix this. He _would_ fix this.

He could drive to the Crowder house, but not as he was — wearing Boyd’s ugly sweater, smelling like sex and omega slick, Boyd’s come still slipping out of his ass, dampening boxers that weren’t his.

The sun was setting as Raylan pulled out of the field, a pale glow behind snow clouds and the dark limbs of leafless trees. He could make it home by dark, sneak upstairs to shower and change, but it would be dinnertime before he managed to clean up and drive to the Crowders’ door.

And that assumed Boyd had gone home. It also assumed that Bo approved of Raylan this week — he never had, before the mine explosion in western Kentucky, but nowadays he seemed to alternate between lauding Raylan’s attempts to harass Boyd into a job aboveground, and scorning Raylan’s insistence on honest work.

He’d figure something out. He’d call, maybe. Boyd would come to the phone, if Raylan asked. Boyd couldn’t have meant what he’d said, about them not being – not being what they were. He just meant they were done fighting, was all. Raylan hadn’t meant any of the shit he said. Boyd knew that.

Raylan pressed harder on the gas pedal, spinning the tires over snow and icy roads. He’d call, and Boyd would answer, and they’d meet up tomorrow or the next day.

Boyd wouldn’t leave Raylan.

Boyd wasn’t ever the one who wanted to leave.

_You’ll say anything, won’t you, if it means getting your way?_

_I’m a better alpha than you could ever be._

Raylan kept his hands tight around the steering wheel, sunk his teeth into his bottom lip and drew blood. It was only twenty minutes home, if he hurried. He could shower in five. He leaned forward, the gas pedal pressed to the floor and the revolver on his lap.

 _Maybe next year_ , Boyd had written, promising Raylan a holster for his new gun. Promising to share cassette rights to Boyd’s new sound system. Everything would be fine. It would. Raylan just needed to get home.

* * *

Boyd wasn’t home, the first time Raylan called. The fifth time Raylan called, Bowman cursed him out on the line while Arlo cursed from the dining room table, both of them irritated that Raylan was holding up dinner on Christmas Eve.

When Raylan started wondering if Boyd had hit a patch of black ice, Bowman hung up the phone after threatening to leave it off the hook so Raylan couldn’t get through.

Twenty minutes after that, the phone rang, and Raylan knocked over his chair racing for it, dropped his napkin in the bowl of peas.

It was Cousin Edna Jean, in Tennessee, making her yearly phone call to her Kentucky kin. “Call back later,” Raylan demanded shortly, and hung up. When he slunk back into the dining room, Aunt Helen hit him with the ladle.

He perched on his chair, pushed some vegetables and cornbread around his plate, couldn’t lift his fork to take a bite.

“Christ, excuse the child, Frannie,” Aunt Helen begged. “He ain’t gonna eat till he’s heard from the Crowder boy, and all this fidgeting is ruining my digestion.”

The phone rang and Raylan excused himself, threw his fork onto the plate with a resounding clang.

“Hello?” he asked, hushed, his fingers winding through the cord, twisting it into knots to match the ones tightening under his ribs.

“My brother suggested that I call,” came the taciturn reply, Boyd’s voice drawn through static and wire. Raylan slumped against the wall, exhaled loudly into the phone, a burst of noise down the line. “To inform you that I did not come to the same tragic end as the Gilliam boys.”

“Tell your boyfriend to take a fucking chill pill!” Raylan could hear Bowman’s muffled voice, no doubt hollering from the living room with a TV tray and a full mouth. “He’s worse than a bitch!”

That was probably the most insightful statement Bowman had made all year. Too bad he would never know it.

“I opened the presents,” Raylan blurted out, phone cord tangled around his hand, fingertips going white. “I –” He stuttered to a halt, couldn’t dig any words up from where they settled low in his gut, oily, churning tar hardening to stone.

“Raylan,” Raylan’s name a half-hearted chiding underscored with a child’s longing, hand pressed to the TV screen and wishing he could step through to the other side.

“I guess you peeked at your gift,” Raylan continued, babbling over the echoes Boyd sounded into his name. “Which ain’t fair, but you should come get it anyways. We could rip out your old radio, while you’re here, drive your truck into the shed where it’s dry and rig up some lights.”

Boyd sighed through the phone, a rush of air drifting up from the Crowders’ house, over Harlan’s hills and through hollers to the Givenses’ kitchen, the receiver pressed to Raylan’s ear hard enough to hurt.

“I ain’t so sure that’s a good idea.”

Branches from the tree in their backyard scraped over the upstairs windows, the counterpoint to the scrape of cheap aluminum cutlery on chipped china plates in the dining room, the grating sound of Arlo’s voice as he held court.

All of it seemed very far away, faint as snowflakes landing on the roof, Raylan in a bell jar with no sounds but the quiet rhythm of Boyd’s exhalations over the phone.

Raylan took a deep breath, rested his forehead against the wall. “Please,” he said, because it was never Raylan who had the right words, the ones that could sway the world if the world ever gave Boyd Crowder a microphone. “Boyd. Please.”

Silence ticked over the lines.

“You’re paying that goddamned phone bill, boy!” Arlo shouted from the dining room, throwing a bread knife through the doorway toward his son.

“Shut the fuck up!” Raylan snarled back, twisting the receiver away from the door and his daddy’s vitriol. “Boyd?”

Boyd sighed. “You said you didn’t want ... that, anymore,” he answered, but Raylan could hear the word left in the pause.

“I didn’t say that,” Raylan protested, kicking his bare toes against the kitchen cabinets, rattling the pots. “And it ain’t like you listen when I talk.” Raylan had said he wanted better for Boyd, and Boyd heard Raylan denying how they were. Raylan said he didn’t want to be owned, and Boyd heard him march out the door.

“You are mistaken in that belief, Raylan,” Boyd replied, Raylan’s name the first glimpse of a boy’s big, brown eyes peering out from behind his mama’s skirt on a quiet afternoon, the finger guns and shared treasure of stolen cookies when they played outlaws. “I have always accorded you the utmost attention.”

“That ain’t quite the same thing,” Raylan muttered, but it was Christmas Eve and his chest still ached from the impact of their earlier fight, so he shook his head and changed the subject back to the pit in his stomach, the slam of his truck door and Boyd gone into the snow.

“That’s it, then? ‘Cause I –” Raylan’s mama came into the kitchen with a pile of dirtied plates, and Raylan coughed, twisted to face the wall. “- ‘cause of that? You ain’t – you ain’t gonna bring the truck over?”

_You’re really done? With – with whatever this is?_

“Oh, Raylan.” Boyd sounded like a ballad, the first mournful notes of a lone banjo deep in the hills. “Do you truly believe that I could –” His voice caught, tripped to a jerky halt in the middle of his sentence like the awkward teenage boy Boyd had never been. He trailed off, and Raylan could almost see him running callused fingers through his dark hair, leaving it sticking in all directions like an untrimmed hedge.

“I can come over in the morning,” he finally said, resigned, his voice a white flag and a lowered gun. “Long as I’m home for Christmas dinner, and your family don’t come out on the porch waving shotguns. Again.”

It was always Aunt Helen, aiming her shotgun at Boyd. Arlo was too pragmatic to shoot Bo Crowder’s son — no point in ruining future partnerships just for the opportunity to shut Boyd’s mouth for good.

“Mama won’t let ‘em,” Raylan promised. “She says we need a tall, dark stranger visiting, for luck.”

That was New Year’s, and they both knew it, Harlan boys steeped in the blood and superstitions of their hills. But Aunt Helen wouldn’t shoot a guest on Christmas. Probably. Raylan was nearly certain she wouldn’t, if only because folks who died on Christmas were said to have a free pass to heaven, and Helen wouldn’t give Boyd the satisfaction of a free ride.

“Did you remind your mother that I am not, in fact, a stranger?” Boyd sounded amused, a smile no doubt quirking the corners of his lips the way it always did when he spoke about Raylan’s mama.

Raylan shrugged, ducked his head to hide the answering smile that Boyd would somehow sense through the phone. “You’re awful strange, though,” he retorted, paused to listen for the sharp clatter of Boyd’s surprised laugh. “And Mama says that’ll do in a pinch.”

Boyd chuckled, murmured Raylan’s name with a fondness that shattered the stones sitting heavy in Raylan’s gut. Boyd’s voice was gunpowder tucked under a rock face, aloe smoothed over skin scraped raw.

“Raylan?” Boyd’s hesitant tone caught Raylan’s attention, just as he’d been feeling warm and thinking about hanging up, sipping some whiskey in the living room until he couldn’t take Arlo anymore, then heading up to the new books waiting in his room. The smile slipped off Raylan’s face.

“Yeah?” he responded, holding his breath and wondering which part of the fight Boyd would force them to relive. The part where Raylan called Boyd a terrible alpha? Where Boyd had said that they weren’t anything, that they’d only _used to be_ friends?

“Tomorrow.” Boyd stopped. Inhaled. “Tomorrow. Let’s just work on the truck and play your horrible death music, all right? Let’s not ...”

“Talk?” Raylan suggested, since that seemed to be what got them both into trouble. No surprise there. There was a reason Raylan had always spoken with his fists. “Yeah.”

Boyd was coming over tomorrow. Boyd had picked up the phone and called Raylan. They weren’t done.

They weren’t done.

“Yeah,” Raylan repeated, grateful, sinking against the faded wallpaper and closing his eyes. “We can do that. We could even take out some Emulex and blast the ice off the millpond, if there’s time.”

“Merry Christmas, Raylan,” Boyd whispered, Raylan’s name the soft brush of Boyd’s fingers through his hair when he thought Raylan was asleep, the black ink of a marker on a cassette.

“Merry Christmas, Boyd,” Raylan replied. And maybe it would be, come tomorrow morning when Boyd pulled up the drive. Maybe Christmas would make everything all right.


	13. Chapter 13

“Fucking February.” Raylan’s teeth chattered, and his eyes watered in the gust of cold air as they stepped out of the mine. Winter had been mild, since New Year’s, warmer than usual — warm enough that he and Boyd could spend their afternoons up at the field, playing cassettes on Boyd’s new radio and passing time. (Last winter had blown in early, leaving them with few hideouts besides the public library, which _did_ have the advantage of being perhaps the only place in the county with indoor heating that their daddies would never go.)

But, mild heatwave or no, it was still February, and the temperature must have plummeted while they were down the shaft. Snow that felt more like shards of ice whipped toward their unprotected faces, and spring flowers that had bloomed too early in the ashy soil of the parking lot withered in the frost.

“Fuck, Boyd, hurry up and start the goddamned truck!”

“If you would hold onto your goddamned horses, you impatient bastard,” Boyd replied, fumbling with the key, his fingers clumsy with cold. If Raylan was shivering, Boyd was probably on the verge of hypothermia.

“Give me that.” Raylan snatched the key ring out of Boyd’s frozen hands and jammed it into the ignition, twisting it hard and listening to the starter click furiously without turning the engine over. He let go, then tried it again, both of them holding their breaths, exhaling in relief when the truck rumbled to a start.

“Hallelujah,” Boyd rejoiced, and turned the heat all the way up, never mind that it was blowing frigid air. “Now get out there and scrape off the windshield so we can leave,” he demanded, handing Raylan the scraper and gesturing imperiously toward the windshield coated with frost.

“Oh, fuck you, too,” Raylan replied, but he climbed out of the truck and started chiseling away at the ice. Useless fucking alpha, Boyd was, so goddamned sensitive to the cold.

“Ain’t that Boyd’s truck?” Napier wondered, walking by with his hat pulled low and his shoulders hunched against the small cyclones of icy snow, Scroggins a foot behind him and wisely using Napier’s bulk to block the wind.

“It is.” Raylan sniffed, switched hands because his right fingers were numb and neither of them had thought to bring gloves. Hadn’t needed them for a month, before today.

Scroggins chuckled, slapping Raylan hard on the back. Napier kept his distance — he hadn’t gone near Raylan since November. He still apologized if he accidentally caught Boyd’s eye underground, no matter that Raylan had threatened to castrate Boyd if he didn’t stop glaring at Alf.

“You’re a prissy bitch, Crowder!” Ronnie hollered into the truck, and Boyd flipped him off with a grin. “Making Givens do all the work!”

“Guess we know who the real alpha is,” a third, regrettably familiar, voice chimed in, thick with nasally disdain. Raylan’s shoulders tensed, and he shifted the scraper to rest more comfortably in his hand, more than ready to scrape a few layers off Roscoe Holland if he kept running his mouth.

Roscoe had joined the graveyard shift in early February, though thank God he was on a different crew. He was Jimmie Louise’s cousin on their mothers’ side, and even without the beady eyes Raylan would have pegged them as kin from the umbrage they brought into a room. Raylan had figured it’d be _him_ that Holland came after for spurning Roscoe’s lying cunt of a cousin, but it was Boyd that he seemed to hate, and Raylan couldn’t fathom why.

Holland spewed the same vitriolic crap Jimmie had, though he generally mumbled it quietly enough that Boyd pretended not to hear him over the grind of the elevator and the rattle of the coal cars. (Raylan couldn’t help but hear everything Holland said, heard every slur clear as if they’d flown off his own tongue, _I’m a better alpha than you could ever be_.) Boyd might ignore it, but Raylan was one insult away from knocking Holland’s yellowed teeth right out of his fucking mouth.

“Everybody stop dawdling and go home,” Briggs commanded, coming up behind Holland and looming until Holland moved. “Or I’ll put you to work shoveling out the parking lot.”

He scowled at the men until they dispersed, then pounded on Boyd’s window. “Roll that down, boy. I ain’t your bank teller.”

“He gets cold,” Raylan objected without thinking, winced when Briggs looked at him across the truck with both eyebrows raised.

Boyd rolled down the window. “And how may I oblige you this fine morning, Mr. Briggs?” he asked, distracting the foreman from scrutinizing Raylan, while Raylan bent his head to hack viciously at a recalcitrant chunk of ice.

“I was checking to see if you pups were coming to poker tomorrow night?”

Raylan peered through the windshield. Boyd peered back, cocked his head inquiringly, leaving the decision to Raylan. Raylan shrugged. Briggs watched them both, something almost soft in the stern set of his face.

“Why yes,” Boyd answered, smiling bright and dangerous at Briggs. “I would be happy to divest you of your hard-earned money, since you’re offering.”

Briggs frowned at Raylan — as if Raylan had it in his power to prevent Boyd from winning the pot. Boyd shivered, and Raylan frowned at both of them, willing Briggs to walk away so Boyd could pull his head back into the damn truck and keep the window closed.

Boyd rolled his eyes, because he had an unfortunate knack for reading Raylan’s mind. “As my dear friend Raylan mentioned, I get cold easy. And since you hardly needed to scare the boys off to invite us to a poker game, sir, I might ask you to speed past the preludes and come to your point.”

One day someone was going to kill Boyd for being a presumptuous asshole, and Raylan wasn’t going to be there to prevent it. (There was no doubt that Boyd would deserve it, but Raylan had grown too accustomed to this particular Crowder to see him crucified for his sins.)

Thankfully, Cullen Briggs seemed to enjoy his powder man’s pretentious jackassery, waving Boyd off with an amused glint in eyes red from coal dust and lack of sleep.

“Laverne, I just stopped by to make sure that you had your _dear friend_ on a leash.”

Raylan tensed. He stopped scraping. Rolled onto the balls of his feet, ready for a fight.

Boyd had stilled, always the first sign of trouble, but he caught Raylan’s eye and shook his head. “I am not entirely certain what you’re insinuating,” he declared slowly, weighing each word as carefully as he handled the powder charges in the mine.

Briggs snorted. “I’m insinuating that Roscoe Holland is a piece of shit,” he announced nonchalantly, but his keen eyes flicked between them, watching Raylan watch Boyd. Boyd smiled, genuinely entertained if not entirely amiable, and Raylan dropped back onto his heels, loosened his grip on the scraper, and unclenched his fists.

“But he’s the kind of shit that sticks to your boots and files charges for assault,” Briggs warned. He must have seen the swing Raylan almost took at Holland before the shift started, when Roscoe strutted into the locker room and Raylan contemplated shoving his shit-talking mouth into a toilet and flushing it down. “So if you do let Givens at him, make sure it happens in a mineshaft where no one’s left to tell tales to the cops.”

Having said his piece, the foreman patted the truck door by Boyd’s arm and tipped his head to Raylan. “I’ll see you cheating rascals tomorrow,” he told them, and walked away. Boyd jerked his head sharply to the left, gesturing Raylan back inside the truck.

“Roll up your goddamned window, you dumb shit,” Raylan mumbled as he climbed back in, because five minutes in the cold had leached all the color from Boyd’s face. “And what the hell was that?” he wondered, once Boyd had heeded sense and obeyed. “Briggs’s blessing?”

“It appears so.” Boyd grinned at Raylan. He flipped the lights on, reversing through the lot at top speed. The few other stragglers from their shift leaped out of the way, because anyone who’d seen Boyd drive knew better than to linger anywhere near his truck once he’d put it in drive. “He’s finally accepted our friendship,” he declared, with a theatrical gasp crescendoing to a small sob. “Just like I always prayed our surrogate daddy might one day do.”

“We’ve got too much of our daddies as it is,” he reminded Boyd. “Don’t you go looking for more. And that wasn’t the blessing I meant, asshole.” Raylan slugged Boyd in the shoulder, grinning when Boyd yelped in exaggerated pain.

He wondered, though. Briggs peered a little too closely, sometimes, had eyes on them in the parking lot or the locker room or in the tunnels at lunch; like it mattered that they drove in together, or that Raylan kept extra socks in his locker for Boyd’s bony feet, or that they shared a cooler Raylan’s mama filled to the brim.

 _Your_ dear _friend_.

Raylan inched toward the passenger door, putting space between them though no one was around to see.

“Does this mean you want to send Roscoe for a stay down the Zodiac shaft?” Boyd asked lightly, like he hadn’t read volumes in Raylan’s quiet, or in the fractions of distance Raylan had wedged between their knees.

Raylan eyed the gap between their legs, for a moment, the space he’d put between them on the seat, cold air instead of Boyd’s cold hands on Raylan’s warm skin. Then he sighed and slung his arm over the back of the seat, stretched out his fingers to drag up the dusty nape of Boyd’s neck, tangled them in the ends of Boyd’s unruly hair. It was dark, after all. Dawn came late, in the winter, and there was no one else on the road to see two boys sitting too close together, to start rumors that were too close to truth.

“I’d hope your daddy taught you better than that,” Raylan chided, brushing his thumb over a fresh scrape on the shell of Boyd’s ear. “You wanting to dump a body down the busiest mineshaft in three counties.”

The Zodiac shaft — originally dubbed Mineshaft 5 by the mining company, but the name had grown bigger with every story told — was said to be haunted, filled with bodies from a cave-in caused by company men, or murders covered up by a cave-in; it never was too clear. Every teenage knothead fool enough to play Truth or Dare wound up in the Zodiac shaft, where they would certainly notice the fresh corpse of an asshole miner and scream loud enough to wake all of Harlan, alive and dead.

“I ain’t exactly a practicing member of the family business.” Boyd gave Raylan a look, a wry lift of his brows and the hint of a twist to his lips.

 _Good_ , Raylan didn’t say. He and Bo Crowder might be in accord over wanting Boyd out of the mines, but they had very different expectations as to where the oldest Crowder boy should go. Expectations that had gone unspoken, since Christmas, when Boyd had learned to stop making demands and Raylan had learned not to open his mouth and spill out his hopes and dreams to Boyd, the way he’d always used to do.

The way he’d used to do, back when he’d been Boyd Crowder’s beta best friend.

“I’ll be choosing the mineshaft, then,” Raylan decided, then glanced down the familiar road and frowned. “What the hell are you doing? I thought we were driving straight up to the cabin?”

They’d planned it out yesterday afternoon, packed the sleeping bags and rationed the lunch Mrs. Givens had packed them. They’d need the food. Raylan had his own plans — Boyd pinned under him, hips juddering, Raylan riding him slow until Boyd _begged_ — and they were the sort of plans that worked up a man’s appetite.

Boyd skidded over a patch of ice, weaving up the hill toward Raylan’s house. “That was before the temperature dropped like an old woman’s tits,” he replied levelly, though he damn well should have discussed this decision with Raylan. “We need coats –”

“ _You_ need a coat,” Raylan corrected, because only one of them was hunched forward toward the heat blasting from the air vents in the truck.

“– and I assumed that you did not wish to begin the day meeting my daddy over a loaded gun.” Apparently, Bo had once more soured regarding Raylan’s influence on his son, since it had been three months and Raylan had failed to persuade Boyd out of the mines.

They turned into the Givenses’ driveway and Boyd hit the brakes, leaving them practically parked in the road.

“Raylan,” he said slowly, scowling down the drive. “What is your daddy doing outside, leaning against your truck?”

 _This_ was why Raylan hadn’t wanted to go home.

“Arlo would like to spend the day with me.” Raylan gave his daddy’s _request_ the sardonic lilt it deserved. Arlo looked impatient, like he’d actually been expecting Raylan to show up despite the answer he’d given yesterday — a blunt, invective-laden “no” and a slammed door — just waiting for his obedient bitch of a son to appear. “Said a father should get to know his only son and heir.”

As though Arlo hadn’t had nineteen years to do that. Raylan would have spat the bitter taste from his mouth, if rolling down the window wouldn’t freeze Boyd into a block of ice.

“Why didn’t you mention this last night?” Boyd demanded, growling low in his throat. “You should have said something.”

Raylan rolled his eyes. “Christ, son, you ain’t my mama.” Though he supposed it might have been good for a laugh down in the mines, telling Boyd about his daddy’s sudden interest in forming a paternal bond with his son. “And what does it matter, since I ain’t go–”

“You’re not going,” Boyd insisted, a reverberation in his voice that raised Raylan’s hackles and made him all too aware of his bare neck. Made him want to wrap his hands around it, so he didn’t bow his head and offer himself to Boyd. He could feel the weight of the command hanging heavy in the air, brushing over his vulnerable, omega skin, resistible only because Raylan was out of Boyd’s reach. “It’s a scam, Raylan. You know it is. Your daddy ain’t never loved anything but money and the sight of someone cowering under his fists.”

“And by ‘someone’, you mean me?” Raylan snapped, folding his arms across his chest.

Boyd’s head spun around from where he’d been snarling through the windshield at Arlo; his eyes widened when he caught sight of Raylan’s expression, faced with the ice in Raylan’s eyes. He shivered. Boyd always had been sensitive to the cold.

“No, of course I don’t mean you.” Boyd could cheat at poker without a single tell, could sell coal down a mineshaft — could smile his impossibly brilliant smile — but he had never once been able to lie to Raylan. He seemed to remember that, and dropped the hand he’d been edging toward Raylan’s knee, not that Raylan would have let Boyd touch him and put force behind his ringing commands. “I am only pointing out that your daddy is a lying son of a bitch, and you sure as hell ain’t going anywhere with him.”

Raylan hadn’t _intended_ to go anywhere with Arlo, who was indeed a lying son of a bitch — and that was probably the nicest thing that could be said about the man. He hadn’t told Boyd because they had planned to head straight out of the mine and up to the cabin. If the temperature hadn’t plummeted to the ninth circle of hell, they wouldn’t be there at all, and Arlo could have stood there for hours freezing his alpha balls right off.

But.

“And what the hell is _your_ daddy, huh?”

Raylan wasn’t allowed to say a goddamned word against Bo Crowder, never mind the days Boyd came to work black and blue, limping from what he called roughhousing with the other Crowder boys. And sure, it might have been Johnny or Merle or Bowman landing punches too hard, but they wouldn’t have laid a hand on Boyd without Bo’s warrant. Raylan regularly bit his tongue bloody to keep from saying that Bowman was an imbecile and Bo was a bully and Boyd was the only Crowder worth more than the cost of the bullet and the dirt for his grave.

“Raylan –” began Boyd, apologetic, but that might have been because he could read Raylan like a book, knew the notorious Givens temper would knock them both to their knees.

If Arlo had pulled this stunt a year ago, Boyd wouldn’t have said a goddamned thing, because — back when they’d only been friends — he and Raylan had had an unspoken agreement to let sleeping, rabid dogs lie. Boyd would never have attempted to order Raylan to stay in the car, not when he had believed that Raylan was a beta. And for the first time in months, Raylan wished Boyd hadn’t found out the truth.

“I don’t _cower_ ,” Raylan hissed, jerking away from Boyd’s hand, from the command Boyd had had the gall to cast unthinkingly into the air. “Not for him, and not for you, Boyd Crowder.” _Not for anyone._

Boyd might have replied, but Raylan couldn’t hear him over the crash, when he stormed out and slammed the truck door.

He shuddered, hit with a gust of bitterly cold air and the sharp pinpricks of ice disguised as snow. Started marching down his driveway, the wind whipping tears into his eyes and burning his cheeks, blurring his daddy’s broadening grin.

Boyd’s ancient, holey muffler rattled as he drove away, the noise crashing into Raylan’s back and driving his shoulders up, hitting him harder than the winter wind. Boyd wasn’t stupid enough to stay and keep fighting, not when they’d acted out their whole scene under Arlo’s bloodshot gaze.

“Kept your daddy waiting, boy,” Arlo castigated, as soon as Raylan made it down the drive. “You’re fortunate I’m in a forgiving mood. Now get in the truck.”

Raylan ducked his head low, twisted a little to catch a glimpse of the road; but of course Boyd wasn’t there. Wasn’t waiting at the end of the drive, where he would see Raylan’s shoulders tuck against his ears, see him stay swinging distance from his daddy’s shark-tooth grin.

Raylan shoved his frozen hands into his pockets, and got in the truck.

* * *

It was a scam, obviously. Just like Boyd had said. Just like Raylan had known it would be, even if he’d been surprised by breakfast at the nice diner up in Evarts, or the after-breakfast drink at the VFW and a warm hour inside listening to Arlo’s stories of the government’s idiocy in the war. Raylan should have bought his own breakfast, shouldn’t have taken the drink. He should have made Boyd keep driving as soon as they’d caught a glimpse of Arlo smirking outside.

“I’m just shocked that you expected me to help,” Raylan said, stomping through the Graves’s yard and ripping open the door on Arlo’s truck. “You really thought I’d convince my old teammates to start bareknuckle fighting for your benefit?”

“It’d be the only good thing you ever did for that team,” Arlo replied, clipping the mirror on the Graves’s new, German car as he peeled out through their yard. “After losing them the championships last year.”

Raylan was the only reason the Black Bears had made it to the playoffs. It sure as hell wasn’t Johnny Crowder’s pitching getting them there, or Hunter’s slow blink at first base.

“Goddamn it.” Raylan cracked, pounded his fist into his thigh, the skin on his knuckles red from the cold. He’d never even made it inside for a coat. “You son of a bitch. Couldn’t have buttered me up for one goddamn day, could you? Was it too hard to pretend you actually wanted to spend time with your son, just for one day?”

Arlo sneered, spat out the window he’d left open despite Raylan’s shivering during the drive out of town and up the hill to the Graves’s. “You weren’t worth the price of breakfast,” he declared. “Took me three drinks to stand the sight of you, boy. Why the hell would I spend the whole day with you, when you proved already that you’re nothing but Frances’s whining little bitch? Always knew I should’ve drowned you in the creek. Better a dead son than a worthless beta cunt.”

“Stop the car.” Raylan’s chest had been tight all day, muscles clenched against the cold, his coat still on the hook in his living room. He shoved down the arm he’d curled over his stomach, bit his lip and twisted the handle on the door, springing the latch so he could jump out as soon as Arlo slowed down. “Let me out of the fucking truck. I’d rather walk home.”

“You want to get out, sissy boy?” Arlo wondered, gaze brittle as rusted iron, teeth bared in a cold smile. “Fine. Get out.”

Then he gunned the engine, swerving to the right before cutting hard to the left. The passenger door flew open with Raylan’s fingers still wrapped around the handle, dragging him out of the truck and suspending him in midair for one long, crystalline moment before slamming him into the frozen pavement of the road.

Raylan landed on his side, felt his hip bones, shoulder and knee ricochet off the pavement, then rolled before he could get his hands up to protect his face, catching his cheek on the gravel and tar of the road, the world spinning topsy-turvy and bursting with lights as he rolled right off the macadam and into the culvert at its edge.

He laid there for a while, listening to the sound of Arlo’s truck as it drove away, the clang of the passenger door when he took another turn and swung it back into place. Then he pushed himself to his feet, shook the ringing out of his ears and the starbursts of light from his eyes, and started walking back up the hill to the well-kept suburban house he’d been happy to leave behind.

He’d need the Graves’s phone, to call Boyd.

 

Raylan was halfway down the hill again when Boyd came roaring up the road, skidded into a miserable failure of a U-turn that did fortuitously put the passenger door only a few steps in front of Raylan.

Which didn’t stop Boyd from leaping out of the truck and racing over to open Raylan’s door, rocking back onto his heels like he wanted to offer Raylan his arm but was too smart to try it.

Raylan supposed he couldn’t blame Boyd for wanting to. Mrs. Graves had taken one look at him and tried to call 911, before Raylan had convinced her that Boyd would come as quickly as any ambulance. She’d subsided, though he suspected that was because she didn’t want the neighbors looking, watching through their brocade curtains as the paramedics rushed the bleeding white trash boy out of their nice home. It was the same reason she’d let him start walking down the hill to meet Boyd, instead of insisting that he wrap up in one of her expensive, gold-threaded blankets and stay inside.

“Christ, Raylan,” Boyd was muttering, pressed right up against Raylan’s side, lips grazing Raylan’s abraded cheek. “I’m going to fucking kill him. You need to go to the hospital, dammit.”

All the snobby suburban folks were probably watching, but Raylan slumped into Boyd’s chest anyhow, dismissed all their stupid peeping eyes and let Boyd haul him gently over the last few feet of road and up into the blissful, sweltering heat of Boyd’s truck.

“No hospital,” he whispered, sliding down to rest his head on the top of the seat and closing his eyes. “Blood tests.”

Boyd let out a string of inventive curses, but he’d clearly understood. Blood tests meant Harlan would find out that Raylan was, in fact, the sissy bitch his daddy had always claimed.

He settled Raylan’s aching arm at his side, then grabbed a blanket that he must have tossed into the cab from the truck bed on his way over, to warm it up for Raylan. Boyd wrapped him up like a hamburger at a fast-food joint, tugging corners over Raylan’s shoulders, shoving the ends of the thick wool blanket under his knees.

“I’m closing the door,” Boyd warned, fingers lingering where he’d tucked the edge of the blanket around Raylan’s bruised hand. “You keep all your gangling limbs out of the way, all right, baby?”

“Fuck you,” Raylan murmured, but he didn’t shy away from the kiss Boyd brushed over his chin, and he didn’t bother to open his eyes.

Boyd shut the door with a soft click, then vaulted across to the driver’s side and scrambled in, chafing his hands together in front of the vents.

“C’mere,” he coaxed, saccharine sweet and sticky with it, and maybe Raylan had gotten stuck to Boyd years before, and that was why he slid closer instead of keeping away. “Jesus H. Christ, you’re a mess.”

“You’re blocking the road, jackass,” Raylan rasped, his voice lost to the macadam and the cold and the ruinous goddamn day. Boyd ignored him, busy nuzzling Raylan’s ear and lapping at the blood dried or frozen on Raylan’s cheek like they were feral pups. “Quit that,” he demanded, because they weren’t savage hill folks who licked each other’s wounds, no matter that Boyd’s tongue felt rough and warm and good on Raylan’s raw skin. “And start driving, would you? I got places to be.”

“I can see that.” But Boyd stopped treating Raylan like a popsicle and put the truck into gear, steering more carefully than he usually did to keep them out of the ditch. “We’re going to your Aunt Helen’s. She can fix you up while I go rip out Arlo’s throat.”

Raylan opened his eyes, tried to blink away the whirling, dizzying haze. “You ain’t doing that,” he said firmly, struggling to free himself from the blanket and sit up. “I’ll walk home, Boyd, before I let you do that.”

They weren’t mates. This wasn’t Boyd’s _legal right_ , like he seemed to assume, like he had pretended it was when Napier had lost control of his drill. Raylan didn’t want Boyd trying to kill his daddy. Raylan didn’t want Boyd anywhere near Arlo, ever, not within striking distance of Arlo’s harsh fists and serrated teeth. It might be Raylan’s tombstone in the yard, but Arlo wouldn’t hesitate to dig Boyd’s grave.

He didn’t notice the cool fingers curling around his wrist, not until it was too late.

“You’re not walking,” Boyd commanded, voice crackling with the promise that if he so chose, he could _make_ Raylan obey, hand clamped around Raylan’s omega wrist and alpha command rumbling from his chest.

Raylan looked at his wrist, pale with cold and scraped bloody by the road, Boyd’s coal-dirty fingers worse than steel handcuffs locked over his skin.

“Don’t do this,” he said, feeling the world spin upside down, because the Boyd that Raylan knew would never force Raylan to his knees. He had thought Boyd was better than that. Of course, he had been fool enough to believe — for one quiet, gullible moment — that maybe his daddy wanted nothing more than breakfast and a companionable drink. Alphas were all the same, in the end, nothing but knots and teeth and fists.

“You’re hurt,” Boyd said softly, and it still wasn’t a command, but it could easily become one, the hints of it buzzing through Raylan’s torn skin, pulsing with the ache in his cheek and the crack in his chest. “You’re staying in this truck.”

Raylan kept struggling, groaned when he jarred his shoulder and set loose a cascade of sharp, grinding pains down his arm and side.

“Raylan, goddammit, stay still! I’m just trying to do what’s best for you.”

“Are you now?” Raylan retorted, because he knew how this story went better than anyone. “Next you’ll try beating some sense into me,” he said, spitting the ugly, familiar words, because Boyd wasn’t the only alpha who claimed to know _what_ _was_ _best_ for Raylan. “But I can tell you from experience, Boyd, it won’t stick.”

“That’s not what this is,” Boyd swore, but he kept his hand on Raylan’s wrist despite the pained noise Raylan couldn’t swallow down, and it was obvious that he would command Raylan before he’d let him go.

Raylan didn’t think he could survive Boyd commanding him, right then, not when he was already bleeding and his chest already felt hollowed out by Boyd’s willingness to drop his teeth and betray Raylan’s trust. So he stayed still as the dead, breathed shallowly and didn’t twitch a muscle as they drove down the hill and through the town, dizzy and bloodied and throbbing with pain, all of it centered where Boyd’s hand loosely encircled his wrist.

Right up until Aunt Helen’s driveway, where he tried to twist away.

“Just let me walk you to the damn door,” Boyd growled, but Raylan would have gnawed off his own arm to get away, and maybe Boyd saw that in his eyes, and let him go.

“Go to hell,” Raylan hissed, unlocking the door and tumbling gracelessly out of the truck, blanket still tangled around his waist. “And if you go after Arlo, Boyd, I’ll ...”

He ground his stupid, dull teeth, because there was nothing he _could_ do, and it seemed obvious and inadequate to say that he’d never speak to Boyd again. Omegas couldn’t command obedience.

All an omega could do was beg.

“Don’t,” Raylan whispered, blinking rapidly, the frozen air stinging his eyes. “Please.”

And then he walked away, without ever lifting his head to look at Boyd. Raylan was nothing but an omega, after all, and omegas only ever got their way when they went to their knees.

When he got to the front door it was open, Aunt Helen standing on the porch smoking a cigarette, squinting angrily at Boyd as he sat idling in the drive.

Boyd must have decided that Raylan would make it inside, so reversed grudgingly onto the street and drove away, back into the winter storm sweeping through town, over the black ice building up on the roads.

With Boyd gone, Aunt Helen finally turned to take in Raylan’s battered face and unfocused gaze, the hand at his ribs and the limp where his knee had bounced off the road.

“Christ almighty, I always knew that boy was trouble.” She flipped her cigarette into the lawn and hurried Raylan into the house, bustling past him to the bathroom to get the peroxide and gauze. “I told Frannie nothing good ever came of a Crowder, but did she listen?”

“Boyd didn’t do this.” Raylan rubbed his right fingers over his left wrist. He could still feel Boyd’s calluses rough against the thin skin over his veins. Could hear the alpha thrumming through Boyd’s voice, timed to the pounding echoes in Raylan’s aching head. “Arlo ejected me from his truck.”

Aunt Helen came down the hall, her thin lips pursed, her entire medicine cabinet in her arms. “Don’t matter,” she vowed, popping the lid off the aspirin and pouring too many into Raylan’s hand. “If it’s your daddy today, it’ll be Boyd Crowder tomorrow. You’re soft on that boy, but I saw him lay hands on you in that truck, and I doubt that it’s the first time.”

The peroxide stung, when she dabbed it along his cheek, nothing like the soothing flat of Boyd’s tongue.

“You need to get out of Harlan, Raylan,” she said lowly, and that was probably true. Raylan _was_ perched on her sofa, gravel embedded in his skin from a day with his father and his fingers around his wrist, the memory of Boyd’s hands and tongue and strident commands. “You need to leave before it kills you.”

“And how do you suggest I do that?” Raylan wondered, because he’d been trying to tell Boyd that for _years_ , and yet they were still in Harlan, fresh out of a shift at the mines and straight into another fight. Boyd wouldn’t budge, and so here Raylan was, beat to shit and bleeding on his aunt’s lumpy couch.

“I’ve been saving up money,” Helen answered proudly, but that wasn’t what Raylan had meant.

* * *

“Wasn’t sure you’d come,” Boyd confessed, dragging the square tips of his fingers over the gauze on Raylan’s cheek, lapping proprietarily at the cut on Raylan’s jaw.

“You were hoping I wouldn’t, you mean,” Raylan countered, spreading his legs and rocking up so Boyd’s cock would catch on his hole, trying to hurry Boyd along. “Since I’m the one who just kicked your ass at five-card draw.”

Raylan had stayed at Helen’s the night before, slept off the headache and let her pamper him with candy and cartoons like he was still eight years old. He had endured her scowls when Boyd had pulled into the driveway the next evening. Raylan had been out the door and into the truck before she could finish ranting about no-good, nasty Crowder boys, but he’d stayed well over on his own side.

Boyd’s breath stuttered in his lungs, when the head of his cock pressed up against the slick furl of Raylan’s hole, but he didn’t push inside.

“Guess you’re feeling better,” he panted, dropping his head to Raylan’s collarbone, tracing patterns with his tongue and leaving Raylan with goosebumps down his chest.

They’d gone up to the cabin after the game. Boyd had left it up to Raylan: wherever he wanted to go, Boyd would drive him there. (It wasn’t an apology. But Raylan accepted it, all the same.) The pain medication had worn off, by then, replaced by the high of winning the pot, and Raylan had answered honestly when Boyd had asked.

That didn’t mean he had forgiven Boyd, or forgotten the unyielding pressure of Boyd’s fingers around his wrist, the overwhelming tang of his alpha pheromones in the air.

“I didn’t think you’d stoop so low,” Raylan had said lightly, as Boyd steered them toward the mountains. Boyd had opened his mouth, no doubt prepared to answer, to argue circles around the point until Raylan saw it his way, but Raylan had known Boyd long enough that he continued without waiting for Boyd to speak. “You used to think that was a failing in a man, resorting to coercion when all you had to do was _persuade_.”

It was what made Boyd stand out, in Harlan, the one alpha who preferred to keep his teeth dull and clicking on highfaluting words than to drop them and fight.

Boyd snorted, shook his head.

“Raylan,” he said, Raylan’s name the mournful howl of the wind deep in a mineshaft, the hopeless wailing of a Harlan ghost. “You ain’t never been swayed by me.”

“I ain’t never been anything but,” Raylan replied, scraped raw, skin peeled back and honesty poking out like shards of broken bone.

“Don’t do it again,” Raylan had whispered, after they’d finished the drive in silence, his hands in his lap and out of reach.

Boyd hadn’t said a word, but he’d hauled the firewood and blankets into the cabin, let Raylan limp through the thick patches of ice on his own, like he would have back when they were friends, when Boyd didn’t assume that he knew what was _best_. He’d started the fire and handed Raylan the moonshine.

He’d undressed Raylan slowly, like they were in one of those French films Boyd stole from the video store. He kissed and licked and coddled every bare inch of skin until Raylan felt like he was still tumbling out of his daddy’s truck, the world spinning and lights exploding in his eyes.

“Fuck me already,” he urged, because it was too quiet and Raylan could still hear the sharp absence of the promise that Boyd had refused to make.

“Why, Raylan, you only had to ask.”

Boyd smiled against the sweaty skin of Raylan’s chest and pushed slowly into Raylan, both of them gasping at the exquisite sensation of Boyd’s cock sliding into Raylan’s ass.

He might have murmured something else, then, something uttered like a curse when Raylan’s heels dug into Boyd’s back, or Raylan’s wordless shout when the swollen root of Boyd’s cock popped past his rim. He might have whispered something into the unscarred skin of Raylan’s neck; but whatever it was — a promise or a command or something in-between — Boyd had spoken too softly for Raylan to hear.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (A gentle and very apologetic reminder that the boys' happy ending is not in this first book of the saga. But I promise there is one, it's just currently only in my head.)


	14. Chapter 14

Springtime sex was the best sex.

Boyd lifted his head, tongue dragging over his swollen lips, mouth and chin shiny with Raylan’s slick.

“And what brings you to that conclusion, Raylan?” he wondered, licking a stripe up Raylan’s cock when it knocked into his cheek. “As we have thus far only copulated in the winter, and I _know_ you aren’t thinking about sex with anyone else when it’s my tongue up your ass.”

Raylan had hardly thought about sex with anyone else since freshman year — since he’d discovered double dating meant seeing Boyd’s alpha dick red and straining, his rangy muscles flexing as he pounded it into a girl’s cunt — but Boyd didn’t need to hear that. He was too arrogant already, sucking lazily on the head of Raylan’s cock and smirking whenever Raylan bit his lip to hold in a moan.

“Nobody asked you to stick your tongue there,” Raylan riposted, and he could feel Boyd’s chuckle vibrating down his dick. (It was possible that Raylan had interrupted lunch to kiss Boyd. He might have threaded his fingers through Boyd’s hair while they were kissing. It was also possible that Raylan had then shoved Boyd’s head down, and tilted up his hips. Boyd had no room to talk, though, given his very vocal enthusiasm for burying his face in Raylan’s ass, lapping at the come he’d pumped into Raylan a few minutes before.)

Springtime sex meant sprawling across blankets in the grass, crushing weeds and wildflowers, Boyd finally warm enough to strip bare. It was downright hedonistic, laying naked under sun and blue sky at the edge of the meadow, breeze ruffling Boyd’s dark hair and cooling the sweat on Raylan’s chest. Raylan slid onto Boyd’s cock, thighs squeezing Boyd’s narrow hips, hands braced on Boyd’s chest; he staked his claim where God and nature and anyone could see.

“Ain’t you eager,” Boyd groaned breathlessly, rubbing his hands up Raylan’s thighs, gaze drifting slowly down from Raylan’s face to where Boyd’s cock was disappearing inch by inch into Raylan’s stretched hole. “It’s only been two hours since the last time, darling. You trying to kill me?”

“You complaining?” Raylan wondered, clenching his asshole and smirking when Boyd threw his head back and moaned, the line of hickeys Raylan had put on his neck a vivid purple under the sun.

“I sure as hell am not.” Boyd rutted upwards off the blanket, rocked his hips so the head of his cock shifted inside Raylan and made them both gasp. “Even if you were trying to kill me, I can’t conceive of a more pleasurable way to go.”

Boyd’s fingers tightened on Raylan’s thighs, but he didn’t move his hands to Raylan’s hips or flip them over so Boyd could take Raylan hard and fast, the way he’d always fucked girls. It wasn’t that Boyd couldn’t manhandle Raylan — whether or not he acted the part, Boyd was an alpha, and the muscles he’d developed digging in the mines were underwritten with alpha strength — it was that he chose not to. Chose to lay where Raylan put him, biting his lip and running his hands down Raylan’s flanks and letting Raylan do as he pleased.

It pleased Raylan to grind down on Boyd’s cock, the slight bulge where his knot would swell catching on Raylan’s rim. It pleased him to raise up to his knees, watching Boyd watch Raylan fuck himself on Boyd’s dick, Boyd’s eyes black with lust. Two hours ago Boyd had used his fingers and his tongue until Raylan had begged to be taken, a mess of slick and babbling _please_ and _Boyd_ and _oh God_. This time, it was Raylan’s turn to make Boyd scream.

 

“Are you under the mistaken impression that you are as light as a feather, baby? Because let me assure you that you are _not_.”

“Don’t call me baby,” Raylan retorted, and did his level best to center all of his weight on Boyd’s chest. Boyd groaned. “You saying you can’t take it?”

“I’m saying that my spine is being crushed, and I don’t know whether to blame you or the tree.” Boyd twisted his torso, then winced. He’d probably gotten another piece of bark wedged against his ribs. Which was Boyd’s fault, anyhow. He hadn’t needed to sit up, keep them chest to chest until his knot deflated. They could have flopped sideways onto the blankets, an eight-legged, two-headed beast joined at the hips.

“You seen reason, then?” Raylan asked, slouching to rest his head on Boyd’s bony shoulder, press his nose to the bruises he’d sucked onto Boyd’s neck. “Wanna stop shoving bark up your ass and lay down?”

“I do not.” Boyd scratched his stubby nails up Raylan’s back, soothed the resulting shiver with the press of his palms to Raylan’s sensitive skin. Raylan was all fucked out, but that didn’t stop his muscles from fluttering around Boyd’s swollen knot or prevent him from folding against Boyd’s chest like it was where he belonged. “Which is your fault, I suspect. You shine like the sun, Raylan Givens, and blind a man to all good sense.”

Raylan pinched Boyd’s nipple, hard, grinned against Boyd’s Adam’s apple when he let out an unmanly shriek.

“None of your bullshit, Boyd,” he warned, rubbing his thumb gently over the injured nipple. “Or I won’t use Aunt Helen’s money to buy you pretty things.”

“I thought we’d agreed that was traveling money. Gonna hire a private jet, fly to the Taj Mahal.”

Helen hadn’t said a word about the money since February, just cast Raylan pointed, castigating looks every time she saw him with Boyd. He’d told Boyd about Helen’s offer a week after she’d made it, once he’d stopped flinching every time Boyd’s fingers brushed his wrist. _How much?_ Boyd had wondered, but Raylan didn’t know.

 _Enough to leave_ , she’d said, as though Raylan didn’t already have that buried in the field — needed someplace Arlo wouldn’t get to, his daddy a rat gnawing through Raylan’s floorboards and into his walls. Boyd knew about that money, too. Hiding it in the field had been his suggestion. He’d already been keeping his wages in the hollow of a tree, mistrustful of the bank when the manager was Maclaren kin. (Never put all your money in the pot. Never let a man calculate how much you were worth.)

Helen had ten thousand dollars for Raylan, Boyd had guessed. They could go to Atlantic City and double it there, buy a yacht and retire. Got to be more than that, Raylan had retorted, and they’d started making plans for the millions Helen no doubt had hidden in her garden shed.

“Oh, is it a jet to India now?” Boyd’s softening cock slipped free of Raylan’s hole, followed by a gush of slick and come. Raylan wrinkled his nose at the feel of it, and Boyd laughed. “Last week it was a hot air balloon and a guided tour of the Alps.”

“All of which are superior to your plans, Raylan Givens.” Boyd grabbed at a clean corner of the blanket, swiped it across Raylan’s ass. “Last I recall, your plan was to tend bar.”

“To _buy_ a bar,” Raylan corrected, rolling off Boyd and onto his back, half on the blanket and half on the dirt, grass tickling his ear. “I’m gonna need something to do nights, once we pay your way into Harvard Law.”

“I hear it’s cold there, up in Boston,” Boyd murmured, following Raylan down without complaint, laying on his side with one leg thrown across Raylan’s, his head on Raylan’s chest. “Awfully far north, for two Kentucky boys.”

“Would you prefer Mexico?” He ran his fingers through Boyd’s hair, dislodged a twig. “Margaritas on the beach?”

He shouldn’t have brought up Harvard. He’d promised himself to be smarter than that, after Christmas. Harvard wasn’t Machu Picchu, or the Alps, or the Pyramids. It was too close to home — too close to dreams Raylan didn’t share with anyone, conjured from late nights in the truck bed listening to Boyd snore. Dreams of city life, maybe tending bar to pay the rent on a shitty apartment filled with dirty socks and half-empty bottles of whiskey, coming home late to find more books stacked in the entryway, whiny rock playing on the stereo and a dark-haired boy waiting for him on the couch.

It was safer, to talk about Mexico. Safer to focus on less impossible dreams.

“Baby, do I strike you as the sort of man who drinks margaritas?”

“You strike me as the sort who’ll drink whatever’s handed to him.” Boyd hummed contentedly, gentle puffs of air against Raylan’s chest, warm and sleepy and purring like a cat scratched behind his ears. “Also the sort who’s about to start drooling on my chest.”

“I been drooling over your chest for years,” Boyd replied, and Raylan jostled Boyd’s head with his laugh. “And I’ll need my sleep, if we’re lighting out for Mexico.” He traced patterns on Raylan’s stomach with his index finger, turned his head so that his face pressed into Raylan’s skin. “Tell me what else we’ll do with your Aunt Helen’s fortune, Raylan. Tell me what we’ll do in Mexico.”

Raylan tucked his arm behind his head, tipped his chin down and buried his face in Boyd’s fluffed hair, smelling sweat and cheap soap and the faint metallic hint of fire damp and coal. Slid his free hand down Boyd’s arm, around the crook of his elbow; caught Boyd’s fingers and twined them around his own.

“I figured we’d rent some of those Mexican donkeys,” he whispered, breathed the words into Boyd’s scalp. “Search for treasure in the Sierra Madres. Fight off some banditos, so’s I have a chance to shoot my gun.”

“Let’s hope that these banditos have truly terrible aim,” Boyd interrupted, yawning. “Or our adventures in Mexico will be short-lived.”

“Of course they have terrible aim,” Raylan said. “They’re Mexican.” He pulled Boyd a little closer, bent his knee and felt the breeze along his damp ass crack, the aching emptiness Boyd’s knot always left behind. “Ain’t you learned anything from the movies?”

“I learned not to go looking for treasure in the mountains,” Boyd answered with equanimity, though Raylan knew Boyd hadn’t needed to learn that from films. (They’d been born with that knowledge: mountain gold shone because it had been burnished with blood. There were fortunes to be found, in the hills, but the price was too steep to pay.) “But all right. After you shoot the banditos, are we free to leave the mountains? Perhaps return to the beach?”

“I’ve just killed ten bad men and found us a fortune in gold.” Raylan blew his lips against Boyd’s head, made an obscene noise and grinned. “You let me decide what we’ll do next.”

“Okay, darling,” Boyd mumbled, sleep poured thick as cough syrup in his voice. “You decide.”

Raylan paused. Closed his eyes, squeezed them shut. Inhaled as deeply as he could, stomach and chest bursting with air; held his breath until he’d suffocated the sob building in his throat, swallowed down the decisions he’d like to make.

Two boys sharing space in a rickety old apartment, living off hamburgers and burnt eggs because neither of them could cook. One boy stubbing his toe on the Great Wall of Books in their living room, cursing loud enough for the second boy to hear from the bathroom where he was singing ballads into his toothbrush and laughing at the first one’s pain. Two boys living someplace no one would think anything of a couple of poor hicks who never went on dates with omega girls, who rented an apartment with only one bed. Someplace that didn’t exist, and never would.

“I think we’ll head to Hawai’i,” Raylan decided, Boyd’s body a warm weight against his side as he drifted off to sleep. “Wear giant flowers in our hair, drink out of coconuts. Sit on lawn chairs and watch the sun set. See if it catches the ocean on fire, like a great pool of gasoline.

“Maybe we’ll blow up a volcano,” he promised, squeezing Boyd’s lax hand. “If you’re good.”

He kept talking about Hawai’i — and Africa, after that, a safari with trophies bigger than their daddies had ever shot and skinned — even after Boyd began snoring, mouth open and drooling on Raylan’s chest. It was easier to talk about Hawai’i than to talk about things like universities and claimings and the future. (Raylan might make it to Hawai’i with Aunt Helen’s money, but there was no pretending the mountains would ever let them go for free.)

* * *

It was late May, warmth from the sun setting in the hills, the kind of weather that made tourists and hikers rhapsodize about buying a little plot of land in the hills, building a cabin to “get away.” It had rained earlier that day, cast the humidity out of the air and left a brisk, cool breeze in its wake, filled with spring flowers and the promise of lazy summer days to come.

Boyd stole Bowman’s cigarette, leaned against the porch rail and waited for Raylan to pull up and take them down-county for their shift. It was the same place he’d waited for Raylan to pick him up for high school the year before, when he’d woken up every morning counting the days until June, little red numbers ticking down the seconds left until the end of Boyd’s world.

Only here it was, May again, and Raylan still in town. Boyd didn’t have to fear June anymore; there were no baseball scouts coming for Raylan, this year, no bright lights and big league contracts to steal Raylan away. Now Boyd woke up terrified every morning, wondering if this would be the day that Raylan gave up on Harlan: gave his notice at the mine, packed his bags and flew away.

He’d thought it might happen after Christmas, once Boyd had shut his ears to Arlo Givens. (The words had come out of Raylan’s mouth, sure enough, but Boyd knew when Raylan was arguing with his daddy. He just didn’t know when to duck out of the crossfire.) Once he had told Raylan they were done and Raylan had believed him, as if Boyd had ever managed to look away from Raylan.

But Raylan had stayed through New Year’s. Had stayed through February, though he’d held onto his shirt cuffs until March, stretched out his sleeves so they always covered his wrists. (As though Boyd couldn’t command Raylan with a hand on his face, or sharp teeth at his neck. As though Boyd _would_ , when he hadn’t even done anything in February, and whatever he was willing to do was only to keep Raylan from dying of cracked ribs and hypothermia and obduracy.) February, where they discovered that Helen had been saving money for years, Raylan’s trousseau if he would only agree to divorce Harlan and run for a better life.

But February had drifted into March, had slipped day-by-day into April. ( _Springtime_ _sex_ , Boyd thought, and Bowman threw a wary look at Boyd’s dopey smile.) And now it was nearly the end of May, and Raylan –

Boyd checked his watch. Raylan was twenty minutes late.

Boyd’s heart lurched, sped into double time. He dropped his cigarette, had to stub it out quickly before Bowman noticed he’d only taken two drags. What if it was today that Raylan took Helen’s money and ran? What if Raylan was already gone?

The phone rang.

Boyd stood there for a moment, frozen. Then Bowman thumped one meaty arm into Boyd’s shin and demanded that he, “Get the phone, motherfucker,” snapping Boyd out of his thoughts and sending him through the front door into the kitchen and over to the phone.

“Yeah?”

“Boyd.”

Boyd’s head thudded against the wall, body slumped forward in relief.

“Raylan, you’re late. Did you decide to stop for hamburgers again? Because you could have informed me you were playing hooky before I spent twenty minutes standing in my driveway, as I –”

“ _Boyd_. My truck broke down. Mr. Gilliam is allowing me to use his phone, and I would be much obliged if you would stop jabbering long enough to get in your truck and take us to work.”

“Now Raylan, when you say ‘broke down,’ do you mean –”

“Boyd!”

“I’m leaving this very moment. You walk over to Ned Michaels’s while you’re waiting, have a chat with the man about repairing your truck. I’ll meet you at the garage.”

“Don’t tell me what to do,” Raylan muttered. Boyd rolled his eyes and hung up the phone, snatched his keys from the counter and strode back outside, whapping Bowman on the back of the head as he sailed by, buoyed up by the reassurance that Raylan was ten minutes away — was still in Harlan, and waiting for Boyd.

Oddly, Raylan was waiting at the first intersection leading into town, a good half a mile from the garage.

“You’re doing this just to be ornery, ain’t you?” Boyd asked, as Raylan climbed into the passenger side. Then they passed under a streetlight, and Boyd caught a glimpse of Raylan’s face. “What the hell happened? Don’t tell me you picked a fight to pass the time?”

“I did not.” Raylan pursed his lips, turned his head to look out the window so that Boyd couldn’t study his swollen, blackening eye. “Mr. Michaels had two of his employees escort me out of his upstanding establishment. They followed the spirit of his order, I expect, and used their fists.”

Raylan spoke in a low monotone, fingers tapping a discordant rhythm along his jeans, every line of him strung tight enough to snap. If Boyd touched him now, Raylan would take a swing.

“What could you have possibly done to alienate the town mechanic?” Boyd wondered. “Has the man got something against old Chevrolets?”

“He has something against Givenses.” Raylan ground his teeth together, the muscle jumping in his cheek. “Seems that Arlo stole his cousin’s pension, last week. Or bilked him out of his life savings, I didn’t really catch the details.”

“But –” _that ain’t got nothing to do with you_ , Boyd wanted to say. He didn’t. That was something folks like Ms. Tipton from Louisville said, city folks who didn’t understand the hills. “Did you tell him that you’d pay in cash? Or sign over this week’s paycheck from the mines?”

Raylan nodded, spine rigid and face pale as they drove out of town and into the dark.

“Mr. Michaels is not interested in ‘laundering my dirty cash,’ or ‘being fooled by a bad check.’” Apparently ‘my kind’ can’t be trusted: even if I did pay, it would only be so that my daddy could return the next day and threaten to burn the shop to the ground unless Ned gave him all the money in the till.”

Christ, the _upstanding_ citizens of Harlan watched too much TV. Ned Michaels must get along with Mrs. Cawood like a house on fire, both of them dreaming up elaborate crimes for Boyd and Raylan to commit, as if two hillbilly boys had somehow hidden a federal mint at the bottom of a mine.

“I’ll do more than _threaten_ to burn his goddamn shop to the ground,” Boyd growled, as they bounced into the mine’s parking lot and he got a better look at Raylan’s bruised face.

“Don’t.” Raylan’s hand shot out, wrapped around Boyd’s wrist, pinned Boyd to the seat with a bloodshot gaze. “Don’t you do anything, Boyd. It’ll just make things worse than they already are, and I ain’t looking to start a feud.”

Boyd scowled. He had no quarrel with most folks who gave Raylan black eyes. Raylan was a belligerent fuck with a serrated tongue he never bothered to curb, and Boyd had dealt him a few black eyes of his own. But those were _Raylan’s_ crimes. It was one thing, to hit a man who’d just implied you were too stupid to graduate fifth grade. It was another, to have your thugs beat a boy for his daddy’s crimes.

“ _Boyd_ ,” Raylan warned, sounding like he had in the mines with his arm around Boyd’s throat, forcing him away from Napier. Boyd snarled. Slapped his free hand against the wheel, needing to hit something and unable to hit bruised, beaten Raylan.

“Fine. _Fine_ ,” he conceded tersely, jerking his wrist out of Raylan’s grasp, feeling like an omega who’d been bound to their alpha’s command. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling. Boyd’s skin itched with it, chafing under Raylan’s yoke. “I won’t kill Ned Michaels.”

“Or blow up his shop,” Raylan added, because he knew Boyd too goddamn well. “Or do anything else to start a war.”

“Michaels started the damn war!” Or Arlo had. Michaels could have stayed clear of it, though, and instead he’d chosen to beat a nineteen-year-old boy who everyone knew got enough of that at home.

“You wanna debate the nuances of blood feuds,” Raylan asked wearily, “or you wanna go down the shaft and blow shit up?”

“Fuck you,” Boyd snapped, climbing out of the truck. There was plenty of shit Boyd wanted to blow up, at that moment, but none of it was in the mines.

“Fuck this county,” amended Raylan, unfazed by Boyd's anger, falling into step alongside him with the cooler banging between their knees. “What am I going to do about my truck? Michaels bought out Jim’s garage last year. He’s the only mechanic in town.”

Boyd suspected that Raylan was attempting to distract him with a new problem to solve — he had done this for years, created winding, impossible math problems to keep Boyd busy during Government class so that he didn’t spend an hour ranting about Mr. Shorten’s outdated views. Though Raylan did have a point. He couldn’t leave the truck stalled in front of the ice cream shop forever, and he obviously couldn’t have it towed to Michaels’s garage.

“Could take it up to Cumberland?” he suggested, but he could read Raylan’s expression without glancing over at him, see him shaking his head over miles of hills and pitted country roads.

“It would cost more to tow it than that truck is worth.” Raylan zipped into his coveralls, settled his hardhat so that it shadowed the bruises on his face and started walking for the door. “Do we know anyone besides Michaels that can fix an old truck?”

“There’s Kenny Roy Lydall.” The siren rang over the speakers — shift change — and they jogged to the elevator, already running late. “My daddy’s hired him for a few jobs.”

Raylan tried to raise his eyebrows, winced and pressed a hand lightly over his black eye. “Kenny Roy that did a year for statutory rape? That Kenny Roy?”

Boyd rolled his eyes. “Now Raylan, you and the rest of the county know that sentence was bullshit. Girl was sixteen and willing. That boy’s crime was stupidity, thinking a Lydall could make time with the judge’s daughter.”

Raylan blew air disapprovingly out of his split lip, then shrugged. It was true — rumor had it that the judge’s girl had gotten pregnant, got that taken care of over in Virginia, a private clinic, though her family insisted she’d gone north to boarding school. “All right,” he agreed. “And is it stupidity, that’s got him working for Bo?”

The elevator clanked to a halt, and they leaped into an empty coal car headed down the tunnels, soot lifting in clouds under their boots.

“I imagine Kenny Roy finds it difficult to obtain employment these days,” Boyd said mildly. “My daddy is simply offering him an opportunity to earn a wage.”

Raylan smirked. “Oh, is that it? Bo Crowder, rehabilitating the felons of Harlan County?” He nudged Boyd with his shoulder, and Boyd couldn’t help smiling back. “Is there a twelve-step program?”

“Why?” Boyd asked, and didn’t say a word about Raylan’s shoulder still pressed to Boyd’s. “You interested in signing up?”

 

They towed Raylan’s truck to Boyd’s house the next morning with a length of rope they’d gotten from the mines, Briggs shaking his head and declaring he wasn’t liable when they both crashed into a tree and died. Boyd’s engine was smoking, by the time they’d made it, but maybe that was only the thick, burning odor of Raylan’s brakes.

Bo wasn’t home. He had paid to spend the night at Audrey’s, probably, or a similar establishment over the county line, but Boyd didn’t relax until he’d checked the house as well as the yard. He brought his rifle in from the truck, just in case.

They cooked breakfast, Boyd phoning Kenny Roy while Raylan burned eggs, Boyd wedging toast too far into the toaster and shocking himself when he pried the pieces out with a fork. The coffeemaker, at least, worked perfectly, and Boyd poured a liberal measure of his daddy’s bourbon into each mug.

Then Kenny Roy drove up and spent an hour tinkering with things under the hood of Raylan’s truck. Finally pulled his head clear, and shook his head.

“Motor’s blown,” he informed them, running a greasy hand through his mullet. “You’d need to replace the engine.”

“And that’s ... expensive?” Raylan squinted, head cocked like he was back in math class, as if he could calculate the price of a Chevy engine based on the gloomy expression on Kenny Roy’s face.

Kenny shrugged, wiped his hands on his jeans. “Cheaper than a new truck,” he said. “But not if your transmission goes next, or your power train. By then, you could have bought a new C-Series, paid for detailing and upgraded to one with AC and a CD player instead of a radio.”

“Well, shit.” Raylan kicked at a weed sprouting in the Crowders’ yard, dug the steel toe of his boot into the dirt.

“What he means to say,” Boyd cut in, holding out his hand, “is that we appreciate your time and your expertise, Kenny Roy. I will let my daddy know just how grateful we are.”

Kenny Roy shrugged. “Sure,” he said. Shook Boyd’s hand. “If you ain’t gonna repair it, let me know. She’s worth at least a hundred in parts.”

“What do I do?” Raylan groaned, after Kenny Roy had helped them push Raylan’s truck off next to Clary Crowder’s old Ford that hadn’t run since 1981.

“You move your ass,” Boyd insisted, herding Raylan back toward his truck, and thank god that still ran. “So that we are gone by the time my daddy arrives, because he will no doubt be perturbed upon discovering your vehicle parked rather permanently in his yard.”

“I can’t afford a new truck!” Raylan whined, dropping obediently into the passenger’s seat of Boyd’s truck. “How the hell am I ever going to get out of Harlan now? Walk?”

Boyd schooled his face into quietude, flexed his hands on the steering wheel, breathing deeply to absorb the brass-knuckled punch to his gut. Boyd had been a fool, to hope that ... To hope. He woke up every morning knowing that what Raylan wanted most in the world was to get away. It shouldn’t gut him, wring his intestines and crack his ribs, to hear Raylan say it aloud. Boyd rubbed his chest, dug his fingers in hard enough to bruise, and flashed Raylan the world’s goddamn weakest grin.

“Time to invest in that hot air balloon?”

“You’re funny, Boyd.” Raylan scrubbed a hand over his face, didn’t gentle it for the bruises still blooming dark under his eyes. “Downright fucking hilarious. You could do comedy on TV.”

“I wasn’t kidding,” Boyd informed him, shifting into neutral and letting the truck fly down the hill, because it made Raylan scream every time. “Even if there ain’t money for a private jet, I bet your aunt’s saved enough for you to buy a decent truck. Just ask her how much there is.”

Raylan didn’t respond to that. Pursed his lips, kicked at the foot well like it had offended him. Boyd could read the displeasure in Raylan’s taut shoulders at receiving that piece of logical advice. He could read the hand Raylan slid surreptitiously across the leather of the bench seat, bumping his knuckles into Boyd’s thigh, and it eased the twist in Boyd’s gut. Asking Helen how much money she’d saved for her nephew meant discussing _actual_ money, cash for a car and gas and a nice suit of clothes for job interviews, not jets and donkeys, the Eiffel Tower and the Taj Mahal.

Real numbers meant real money; meant the reality of Raylan leaving. That was a conversation they’d avoided since Christmas, Boyd pulling one way and Raylan pulling another, hands raw with rope burn and both of them refusing to let go.

“We’ll ask around town,” Boyd said, pulling onto the town’s main street, because they’d need lunch before they did anything else. Raylan’s stomach had been growling since the last bite of charred toast and overly salted egg. “See if anyone’s selling their old truck for a decent price.”

“Yeah, all right,” Raylan agreed, his knuckles still pressed to the seam on Boyd’s jeans, fabric pinched between his finger and thumb. “Until then, keep your goddamned truck _in gear_. On second thought, since it’s now the only truck that we have and you’re liable to drive it into another ravine, why don’t I drive?”

“Like hell you will,” Boyd replied, but Raylan was laughing, amber eyes lit up like fireworks, and Boyd knew he’d be handing over the keys.

* * *

Light poured in through the window, not deterred in the slightest by the thin lace curtains Aunt Hazel had tatted and hung. Chickens scratched in the bare dirt, pecking for corn, their quiet clucking drowned out by the incessant crowing of the roosters his aunt kept around to fertilize the eggs, sell a few laying hens and fatten up the rest for Sunday dinner.

Boyd groaned and tried to suffocate himself with the pillow he’d claimed off Johnny’s bed, his back twinging angrily after a week spent sleeping on Johnny’s uneven floor. It couldn’t be past noon, what with the morning sun blazing into the room, which meant one more day surviving on only a few hours sleep and enough coffee to make Boyd’s eyeballs shake.

A week of bunking with Cousin Johnny was a week too long, even if Aunt Hazel’s cooking was better than what Boyd had been fed at home.

Or what had been home until last week. One might say that Bo Crowder hadn’t appreciated pulling into his yard — back from Audrey’s, Boyd assumed, given that his daddy’s shirt had been tucked into his zipper, his face red from exertion before it had gone crimson with rage — to find Raylan Givens’s truck parked a few feet away.

Bo had more or less said it himself, once he’d set his son’s head ringing and knocked a few teeth loose in Boyd’s jaw. “You storing that pup’s truck here, are you? Christ, son. It ain’t like there’s anyone left in the county who don’t know you’re a faggot for the Givens boy, but now you’ve brought that disrespect into my front yard! It ain’t enough to let him stick his beta dick up your ass? Now you think he can fuck me, too?”

Boyd had easily curtailed the impulse to announce exactly who was fucking whom. He had thought it might help, months ago, might make what he and Raylan were to each other right with the world.

He knew better by now. Telling folks wouldn’t do a damn thing, because Boyd would never be the kind of alpha raised up in his daddy’s image, and Raylan would never be an omega that Harlan could understand.

Boyd had thought outing Raylan as an omega would stop them calling Boyd a faggot — but it wouldn’t, he’d realized, choking on dirt and spit, his daddy’s boot in his ribs. It hadn’t been wanting to stick his dick up a boy’s ass that had made folks sneer, made them shake their heads and label Boyd the Givens’s bitch. It wasn’t what Boyd hung off his dick; it was the look in his eyes. Boyd would always be a faggot here, because he would never be able to hide the fact that he would do anything to make Raylan Givens smile.

Boyd didn’t tell his daddy how it really was, but he also didn’t hide his snarl. Bo had no right to talk about Raylan like that, to talk about Raylan at all, didn’t deserve the chance to say Raylan’s name.

In retrospect, taking a swing at Bo Crowder hadn’t been the best idea Boyd had ever had, but it had soothed the fury pounding in his chest, roiling through his veins and into his fists and his teeth. If this was how Raylan felt when he fought, Boyd wondered how he ever managed to stop.

Bo had sent his son spinning with a punch to the jaw, which had ended that fight. It had also ended his time living in the Crowder family home.

“I’ve kept you on too long a leash, boy,” Bo had declared, licking blood off his alpha teeth. Boyd had felt a small flare of triumph, then. He’d made his daddy bleed. “I blame your mama for this. She encouraged you making friends with Frances’s boy, groomed you to go ass up for that pretentious little queer. Good thing she died before she could raise two faggot sons.”

If Boyd could have gotten to his feet just then, he would have come at his daddy with sharpened teeth and nails. He would have torn Bo’s throat out for insulting the people that Boyd loved.

“If you intend to remain a Crowder, you’ll stop bringing shame on this family and learn to do as I say. No more fucking around with the Givens whelp, and no more fucking around in the mines when we’ve got work up here to do.”

Boyd had spat blood, pushed himself onto his knees, staggered to his feet and leaned heavily on the sagging porch rail. “Forgive me, Daddy,” he’d said.

Bo had smiled, then, foolishly thinking that he’d won.

“But I am not the one sullying our legacy, nor our family name. I will be the one redeeming it, because someone has to polish off your stain.”

He might have fainted, after that, or Bo might have knocked him unconscious. Either way, he woke up with his face in the dirt and Bowman dumping a bucket of water on his head.

“You’d better get,” his little brother had advised, clicking his tongue against his teeth and shaking his head, sounding like their Aunt Betty when the folks on her soap operas misbehaved. “Daddy’s out with Uncle Cyrus, but he said if you’re still here when he comes home, he’ll have Uncle Cyrus load his gun.”

Occasionally, Bowman talked sense. Boyd’s brother helped him up. Boyd collapsed in a kitchen chair with aspirin and water, sent Bowman upstairs to throw Boyd’s clothes into a duffel bag.

He’d slept rough, the first day, though Raylan had offered his Aunt Helen’s spare room once Boyd had explained the situation over shovels in the mines. But Arlo had gone on a tear that afternoon — Boyd suspected he had spoken with Bo — which meant Raylan was bunking at Helen’s and it wouldn’t do for both of them to take the one room. Boyd anticipated that Helen would say no, if Raylan asked. Helen didn’t much care for Boyd.

The next day it had been raining, and so Boyd had driven out to one of the family’s hunting cabins — and turned right around when he’d seen his daddy’s truck. After three wet days of sleeping rough he’d gone to Johnny’s and hadn’t gotten any fucking sleep since.

He debated moving from the floor onto Johnny’s bed in hopes of obtaining a few more hours of sleep. Then Johnny burst into the room, and Boyd gave up sleeping as a bad job.

“You’ve got to go,” Johnny said, braced against the doorframe, Boyd’s head level with his knees. “Your daddy’s coming, and you had best be long gone before he arrives.”

Boyd rubbed the sleep out of his eyes, ran a hand through his hair and tugged, pinpricks of pain doing nothing to wake him any faster. “I suppose that is the case,” he agreed through a yawn, grabbing for the clean shirt on the top of his bag.

He’d take the bag with him when he left — it was the weekend, after this shift, and the weathermen weren’t predicting any rain. Once they got paid, he and Raylan could get gone for three days with no one the wiser, head out to the state forest with some moonshine and a feast comprised of gas station donuts and jerky, maybe a bag of hamburgers or two. They were both suffering, going on a week without a single morsel of Frances Givens’s food.

He made it into town without passing his daddy’s truck and pulled into Helen’s driveway to find Raylan waiting at the door, swinging it open before Boyd could lift his hand to knock.

“C’mon in,” Raylan invited, but he didn’t step aside, so Boyd sidled in, chest brushing Raylan’s, hips touching for a second before he managed to inch past. Raylan had been doing shit like this for days: blatantly pushing into Boyd, laying claim to the space around him like an alpha would, warning folks away from their mate.

Boyd wasn’t the only one who had noticed it, either. Ronnie Scroggins had offered to beat up whoever had threatened Boyd three days after Raylan’s strange behavior had begun, had assumed that Raylan was being overprotective because some jackass on another crew had insulted Boyd’s good name. (Boyd had tried not to take Ronnie’s kind offer as an insult, but it was hard not to bristle at the implication that Boyd needed a white knight. Harder still to pretend that Raylan didn’t act the part, when Roscoe Holland muttered his usual imprecations against Boyd and Raylan tried to run him over with a coal car.) Briggs hadn’t said anything, but he kept cocking his head and squinting at them, as if Raylan had a warning label printed on his forehead and Briggs couldn’t quite make out the fine print.

Privately, Boyd concluded that Raylan was planning his escape, and it was this imminent departure that had him bumping shoulders with Boyd at the library, sitting in the middle of Boyd’s truck with their thighs pressed together, very nearly following Boyd into the cut when he was laying down Emulex and wire. Raylan had stayed _well_ away from Boyd and Emulex since September and the cave in, and his change of heart prompted even cautious Napier to ask if something was wrong.

“Raylan’s just apprenticing to be the new powder man,” Boyd had informed them, which had doubled the crew over with laughter and distracted them from wondering why exactly Raylan was suddenly stuck to Boyd like glue.

Something _was_ wrong, of course, though Boyd wouldn’t admit that to Napier. Raylan hadn’t said anything about buying a new truck, but Boyd could feel it coming, the precipitous drop in pressure before a storm blew the roofs off every barn in the county and burned the forest to the ground. He and Raylan had lived nearly a year in limbo: twelve months of digging coal and diving into each other, Boyd desperate to carve his name into Raylan’s bones, curl his grasping fingers around Raylan’s heart.

“You planning to sleep in Helen’s entryway?” Raylan murmured, pulling Boyd away from the wall he’d slumped against. He smiled softly at Boyd, lips curved upward, tugging at the cut on his bottom lip where Boyd had kissed him yesterday and snagged his alpha teeth. “C’mon, you lazy son of a bitch. I made you coffee. You don’t move your ass, I’ll make you drink it cold.”

The coffee was hot — and Helen had left for work hours ago, so Raylan must have put on a fresh pot, must have slept lightly if he was up and ready for Boyd as soon as he’d heard the truck coming down the road — and pale from the cream, sugar jar next to the pot. Raylan handed Boyd the cup, still smiling, wrapped his long fingers over Boyd’s and stood too close.

 _He loves me today_ , Boyd thought. He kept his head tilted toward the coffee and peered up through his lashes at Raylan, studying the boy’s narrow face, the gentleness in his amber eyes and the warmth of his hands where they had settled over Boyd’s. Raylan spoke in actions, not words; and Boyd knew Raylan, his stoic face and economical gestures Boyd’s mother tongue. _This morning he loves me_.

It was something Boyd did every morning since Raylan’s truck had died. He watched Raylan like a hawk, calculating the weight of each smile, every clap on the shoulder or roll of the eyes, plucking them like petals from a daisy: _he loves me, he loves me not. He loves me_. As if coffee and a half-smile — Raylan’s love doled out in sugar spoons and flashes of teeth — would delay Raylan’s departure, as if he couldn’t possibly leave on the same day that he’d woken up loving Boyd.

“Raylan, you are an angel.” Boyd lifted the mug to his mouth and drank half of it in one long swallow. Raylan had a habit of adding too much sugar to Boyd’s coffee, but since Raylan brewed coffee that tasted like an admixture of coal dust and tar, Boyd wasn’t going to complain about it being too sweet. “I don’t believe I’ve gotten a wink of sleep in three nights.”

Raylan let go of the cup, though only to shift his hands to Boyd’s hips, hooking his fingers through Boyd’s belt loops and tugging Boyd close, the coffee mug trapped between them. “I’ve got a bed here you could use,” he offered, but the low timber of his voice and the heat in his eyes implied he was offering something far more interesting than sleep. “Helen’s at work until six tonight. That’s plenty of time.”

“Christ, boy, what’s gotten into you?” Boyd leaned back, drained his coffee, and then had to slap Raylan’s hand away from his belt buckle. “We ain’t having sex in your Aunt Helen’s house!”

“Why not?” Raylan pouted, and _God_ , Boyd could smell his arousal, knew that if he slotted his leg between Raylan’s he’d feel Raylan’s erection pressing against his thigh, saliva flooding Boyd’s mouth at the thought of Raylan wet and aching for his knot. “She ain’t home.”

Boyd frowned. _This_ had also been happening, the last few days; and though Boyd certainly wouldn’t gripe about Raylan wanting to have sex every day, it was unusual for Raylan to be so cavalier about things, so willing to flaunt the rules he’d laid down for Boyd, standing too close and planning sex where someone else could see.

“Did you forget your sups?” Boyd wondered.

And there was the Raylan Givens he knew, rolling his eyes and shoving Boyd away, muttering, “Of course I didn’t, you jackass. Though you’re right, I guess they ought to have cured me of any passing interest I might have in your limp dick.”

“I’ll show you _limp_ ,” Boyd growled, catching Raylan’s belt and reeling him in, grinding his burgeoning erection against Raylan’s. Raylan grinned triumphantly, then scowled when Boyd pushed him away. “But not in your aunt’s house. Jesus Christ, Raylan, use your brain. What if she comes home early? What if a few pumps of your toxic cologne and some Lysol ain’t sufficient to hide the smell of sex?”

“She’s a beta,” Raylan retorted, eyebrows drawn together and eyes sparking with annoyance at Boyd’s dilatory tactics. “She can’t smell shit.”

Boyd lifted one hand to rub at his temples, wishing for another cup or four of coffee. He must have looked worse than he felt, because Raylan stopped scowling for long enough to scoop up Boyd’s empty mug, stomp to the coffee pot, and pour him a fresh cup. He even dumped in only half the sugar bowl, though Boyd thought that might have been more of a punishment than a kindness.

“She ain’t stupid, though,” he pointed out, but he kept his voice level, took the coffee and did his best not to choke on the first, noxious sip. “She comes home for lunch and finds us both in her spare room, she’s going to suspect something.” Of course, half the county suspected something — but they didn’t really believe it could be true. Faggots and alpha lovers, omega boys and true mates: those only existed on the TV. “And if someone else comes? Your mama? _Arlo_?”

Raylan’s spine stiffened, and he took a step away from Boyd. “Arlo don’t come here,” he said firmly, but his gaze darted to the kitchen doorway, as though saying his daddy’s name aloud would bring him into Helen’s home.

Boyd reached out, apologetic, hooked his arm around Raylan’s neck like they were thirteen years old again and headed to class, Raylan still a skittish colt who had yet to eye Boyd with anything but mistrust. He shouldn’t have mentioned Arlo. It was just so damned difficult to make Raylan see sense, these days.

“We’ll go up to the field,” he told Raylan, dragging him across the kitchen to deposit his mug in the sink, then heading for the door. “If you promise not to bitch about my driving, I’ll buy you a bag of cheeseburgers on the way.”

“You’ll buy me that and a bucket of french fries, asshole,” Raylan returned, struggling to escape Boyd’s embrace, elbowing him in the ribs when Boyd dug his knuckles into Raylan’s scalp. “And ice cream. Unless you ain’t interested in getting laid?”

He smirked, a cat licking feathers off its whiskers, and Boyd sighed loudly. “Goddamn, you’re a fussy bitch,” he groused, wrestling them out the door. Raylan laughed, threw his head back and guffawed, the pale skin of his throat glowing in the sun, eyes crinkled shut and smile wide as the clear blue sky over the hills.

 _He loves me_ , Boyd thought, and shoved Raylan into the truck.

* * *

Roscoe Holland was in the elevator when Boyd and Raylan stepped in. Thankfully, Briggs was _also_ in the elevator, so Boyd held out hope that the foreman’s gravitas would keep Holland from running his mouth, or, at least, prevent Raylan from attempting to knock out Holland’s nicotine-stained teeth.

Raylan had always said Boyd was too much of an optimist for Harlan County.

“Smells like you got laid, Crowder,” Holland mumbled, flaring his nostrils and taking an exaggerated sniff. “Can you even pop a knot, alpha bitch like you?”

“We got any of those safety earplugs you been on us to wear?” Boyd asked Briggs, turning away from Holland’s side of the elevator car. “I’ve got a mosquito whining in my ear, and I can’t say that I enjoy the sound.”

He didn’t look at Raylan, who’d been fidgeting in his seat on the drive to work, ass still stretched open and twinging around the phantom bulge of Boyd’s knot. They’d gotten to the mines before shift change to sluice off the sweat and come and scrub down with the mine’s harsh soap, washing Raylan’s omega scent away. Either Holland had an exceptional nose, or he was standing far too close to Boyd.

“You don’t need earplugs for a mosquito,” Raylan cut in, his voice menacing. He was leaning against the far side of the car, his arms crossed, brown eyes burning holes through Holland’s chest. “You need to swat them out of the air. Crush them flat and watch them bleed.”

“Not in my tunnels you don’t,” Briggs chided, like Raylan was one of his young daughters. “And not on my crew.”

Raylan pursed his lips and squinted fiercely at Holland, but he minded Briggs, didn’t unfold his arms and take a swing.

Holland grinned, snaggle-toothed and oily as a used-car salesman’s hair. “Aw, Givens. Don’t let your foreman stop you from defending your bitch.” Raylan’s upper lip drew back in a snarl, and Holland laughed. “I ain’t on his crew. Come up to my section of the tunnels, if you want. I’ve got a few sticks of dynamite you can hold.”

“Are you threatening my boys, Roscoe?” Briggs growled, straightening up to his full height and towering over Holland, taller by almost a foot and three times as broad. Cullen Briggs was nearly as big as Boyd’s daddy, could have been just as frightening if he’d ever had any blood on his fists. Briggs wasn’t that sort of man, though — wasn’t the kind of alpha or father to rule with guns and fists and teeth. Boyd would bet that Briggs’s girls still believed in Santa Claus, that they’d never understand what it meant to be nineteen and cast out of their own home.

Holland shrugged, though he did retreat to the door, waiting for the elevator car to lurch to a halt. “I was only warning _your boy_ that he ought to be more careful,” Roscoe said superciliously as the gate squealed open, backing out into the tunnel with an unctuous grin. “After all, the mines are a dangerous place. A man gets lost in the wrong tunnel, he could come to a bad end.”

Roscoe Holland apparently realized that he was about to come to a _bad_ _end_ on Briggs’s fists, and leaped hurriedly into the next coal car clattering down the tracks.

“I gave you permission to kill him months ago,” Briggs rumbled, herding Boyd and Raylan out of the elevator, clapping Boyd on the shoulder and casting a significant look at Raylan. “Don’t tell me you’re both too lazy to do the job?”

It wasn’t the first time someone in Harlan had implied that they would pay Boyd Crowder to make their problems go away. Anyone else, and Boyd would have socked them in the jaw, or spat on their nice shoes. Briggs smiled, though, coal dust lining the laugh lines around his eyes, and Boyd only returned the friendly smile and shook his head.

“Well, sir, a Crowder knows never to finish a job before getting paid, and you ain’t named a satisfactory sum.”

Briggs chuckled, and didn’t seem to notice that Raylan wasn’t laughing with them. Though Raylan’s silence wasn’t that surprising. More surprising was that Raylan hadn’t fluffed his tail in consternation at Briggs’s implication that boys like them — Crowders and Givenses, criminals’ sons — would gladly kill a man and dump him deep into a mine.

Boyd fell back a step, bumped his shoulder against Raylan’s. Raylan jumped. Boyd’s eyebrows drew together, a worried furrow between them. Raylan hadn’t startled like that since his first day in the mines.

“Briggs is gonna pay us to off Roscoe Holland,” he told Raylan, wrapping an arm around his shoulders and steering him into the next coal car. He was too gentle — if Raylan had been paying attention he would have sneered at Boyd, shaken off his arm and grumbled about not needing _any goddamned mollycoddling, fuck you Boyd_.

Instead, Raylan used the excuse of the coal car to slide a little closer, shoulders hunched to fit under Boyd’s arm. Boyd’s concern grew. It was one thing, for Raylan to stand too close to Boyd the way he had this past week, marking his territory with his chest puffed out and his fists cocked. It was another, for Raylan to make himself small, tuck himself into Boyd’s embrace like he hadn’t since the cave-in nearly nine months before.

“He don’t need to,” Raylan finally said, once they were well on their way into the seam, quieter than Boyd wanted him to be. “I’d kill Holland for free.”

 _So would I_ , Boyd decided, when Raylan glanced around them with the spooked, darting gaze of prey, peering at the rattling coal car and the swinging lamps and the tunnel’s shrinking walls. _The mines are a dangerous place_ , Holland had said, and maybe that reminder was all it would take to scare Raylan away. Boyd tightened his grip on Raylan’s shoulder, stretched his grin until his cheeks hurt, and swore that everything was fine.

He was lying, of course, but he wasn’t sure anymore which of them he was lying to.


	15. Chapter 15

Things weren’t fine, and they sure didn’t improve as the shift wore on. Some other crew blasting out a different tunnel was using too much Emulex, shaking the whole damn mountain every few hours. Boyd’s oxygen monitor had gone on the fritz; sent him scrambling out of a cut when the needle dropped into the red, though it had stayed in the green the next trip down, dancing over into the yellow, taunting him with the promise of being down a cut with a handful of explosives and no air.

Needless to say, Boyd leaping out of a fresh cut gasping for air he hadn’t been deprived of and clutching his oxygen monitor had _not_ soothed Raylan’s nerves. He was as antsy as he’d been at the start of the shift, shoveling haphazardly and twisting so that one eye was always on Boyd.

Raylan had always been Boyd’s canary in the coal mine: the one ray of sunlight in the black, bright eyes and birdsong, a creature that didn’t belong buried alongside them in a tomb. (It was no wonder that the canaries were always the first to die. The mine never abided sunlight lingering for long.)

Boyd’s oxygen monitor wasn’t the only thing on the fritz. All their earplugs had gone missing — not that anyone ever wore them, despite Briggs’s cajoling — and Alf’s drill had shorted out three times.

After the third time, Briggs had reassigned him, and scrubbed a hand over his face. “If I didn’t know better,” he’d mumbled, voice low so that only Boyd could hear, “I’d say this shift was curs-”

“Don’t,” Boyd interrupted, glancing nervously at the other miners, at the machines and the roof bolts and the black walls as if they could hear. “Don’t say it.” The air already felt cooler — raised the hairs on the back of Boyd’s neck — and Briggs hadn’t even said the word.

Briggs lifted one eyebrow, skeptical of Boyd’s jittery concern. “Didn’t think you’d be superstitious,” he said. Boyd wasn’t sure if Briggs had assumed that Boyd read too many books to be seduced by old wives’ tales, or if he thought that Crowders weren’t the sort to believe in troubles that they hadn’t conjured up.

“I ain’t,” Boyd replied.

“He’s lying,” Raylan contradicted, and Boyd closed his eyes, flattened out his mouth. _That_ had been why he’d stopped the foreman from hinting that they might be cursed. Raylan had ears like a goddamned bat. Briggs might as well start discussing recent mining fatalities or machine malfunctions. “You ought to have seen him the time he tipped over the salt shaker at Rella’s. Threw some over his shoulder and right into Mrs. Lacey’s hair.”

“What did Mrs. Lacey do?” Briggs wondered, congenial. Boyd squatted down to gather up more Emulex. He could hear Ronnie coming out, shouting that the cuts were made and where the hell was their powder man?

Raylan shrugged. “I don’t think she noticed. It might have ricocheted off all her shellac. That woman’s hair wouldn’t give way in a tornado.”

“If you old biddies will excuse me,” Boyd interrupted, tucking the detonator into the pocket of his coveralls. “Some of us do more than gossip for our living.”

Raylan’s gaze flickered to the Emulex in Boyd’s hands, and he bit his lip, reopened the cut Boyd had put there days before. “Boyd,” he began, licking at the blood welling on his bottom lip, fists clenched at his sides.

Boyd wasn’t sure if Raylan would tell him not to do his job or if he’d ask to come along, but he held up a hand to stave off whichever demand it may have been.

“Hold that thought,” he said, keenly aware of Briggs’s eyes on them both, hoping the urge to lap the blood off Raylan’s bottom lip couldn’t be read on his face. “I’m going to go blow up the seam, and when I return you may continue regaling our esteemed foreman with tales of my misspent youth.”

“That would take us all night,” Raylan retorted, and didn’t relax his fists.

Boyd scuttled into the cut — refused to check his oxygen monitor, because it was fucking useless and he didn’t want to see the needle plummet into the red, didn’t want to look at it and think “cursed” — and started stringing Emulex.

He pressed his palms to the sharp ridges of the wall, felt the mountain vibrate under his hands, Vesuvius belching out her warning to Pompeii. Boyd shuddered, and hurried to finish laying out the explosives. The mine felt all wrong tonight, the smell of fire damp thick in air heavy with something more than Raylan’s childhood fears. He would be glad when their shift ended, when they were all safely back aboveground and free from the mine’s long reach.

Raylan was standing where Boyd had left him, when Boyd wriggled out of the cut and stretched out his spine. Boyd waved the detonator and grinned widely at him, and Raylan rolled his eyes, reluctantly smiling back. “Fire in the hole?” he mouthed, and Boyd flung his arms out, threw his head back and shouted, “Fire in the hole!” just as the mountain rumbled to life over his head, the ground shaking beneath his feet.

Boyd could never recall with any certainty whether or not he’d lit the fuse before the roof fell in.

* * *

The mine was caving in. Slabs of rock broke off from the ceiling. They shattered the lamps and crashed to the floor. The only light came from their headlamps, suffocated by the coal dust kicked up by the collapse. Dust in Raylan’s eyes and his mouth, coating his throat. Dust filling his lungs so that he couldn’t breathe.

He could still see the dim beam of Boyd’s headlamp through the billowing, heaving black. Boyd was right there. No more than twenty feet away. Not far. If he would move, if he would just start _moving_ , he would reach Raylan in no time at all, and they could –

“Givens!” Napier wrenched Raylan’s shoulder, tried to drag him backwards up the tunnel. “We’ve got to go! Raylan, come on!”

Raylan didn’t move. A slab of rock smashed into the floor beside them and Alf let go, ran for the elevator and left Raylan to his fate. Alf had distracted Raylan, wrenched him sideways and spun him around so that he couldn’t find the dim glow of Boyd’s lamp.

Where was Boyd? Where _was_ he, didn’t he know that Raylan _needed_ –

Raylan dug his knuckles into his eyes, flushed the coal dust out with tears. There was Briggs, a few feet away, his lamp pointing the wrong direction, light flashing back into the cut. Pointing at the slab of rock cracking loose from the roof bolts, raining dust and debris onto Boyd’s head, blinding him so he couldn’t see which way to run. Pinning Boyd in place, with two tons of rock about to break loose onto his head.

“No!” Raylan shouted, felt the word tear loose, ripped bloody from his chest. The future was painted in clouds of coal dust: Boyd crushed under a thousand pounds of stone, his gentle fingers broken, his canny grin and firecracker eyes buried and gone. The pulse that jumped in Boyd’s throat when Raylan dragged his teeth across it nothing but a memory bruised over skin gone bloodless and cold. Boyd was always too cold. It was Raylan’s job to keep him warm. “ _Boyd_!”

Then the future changed.

Briggs dove across the tunnel. He shoved Boyd towards Raylan, and for a moment his lamp illuminated the dust billowing around them, caught the sooty lines of Briggs’s face and limned Boyd in gold. Then the slab broke away from the bolts, Boyd stumbled forward and Briggs’s light disappeared.

Raylan froze, both hands still stretched out toward Boyd, who crashed into them a second later, his own hands patting down Raylan’s chest and sides, as if he couldn’t believe that Raylan was truly there.

A rock clipped Boyd’s hat, knocked him sideways, and Raylan’s hands gripped Boyd’s coveralls. “We’ve got to go,” he whispered, still staring at the blackness where Briggs’s lamp had been. “Boyd, we’ve got to go.”

“We can’t!” Boyd shouted back, shaking his head and trying to twist around to peer into the dark, straining because Raylan couldn’t let him go. “We have to get Briggs! He –”

Raylan shook his head. Inhaled through his mouth and choked on the air. “We’ve got to go,” he said again, and didn’t let Boyd look back.

“Please,” he added, and slid his hands down to catch Boyd’s, felt Boyd’s fingers warm and unbroken and twined with his. If they didn’t go now, they wouldn’t be able to leave; they’d vanish with Briggs into the dark, headlamps extinguished and nothing left but the black.

“Fuck,” Boyd hissed, but he didn’t try to turn around. He squeezed Raylan’s hand tightly enough to crack the bones and hauled him up the tunnel, dodging hulking machines and falling rocks, running on scents and his alpha senses, their lamps no better than headlights in the fog. “ _Fuck_.”

Raylan tripped, plastered himself to Boyd’s side and buried his head into Boyd’s shoulder, trying to breathe something besides methane and dust, trusting Boyd to find them a way out of their own graves.

Boyd ran them into the tracks, though the coal cars weren’t running, and they stumbled along them fueled by adrenaline and terror, Raylan’s hand slippery with sweat. There was shouting, somewhere ahead of them, bouncing off the crumbling walls and echoing down the tunnels. There was someone alive, and not just the ghost they’d left behind.

“There you are!” Napier grabbed them both, once they were in sight of the elevator, hugged them to his beefy chest and pounded their backs. “Jesus Christ, boys, we thought you were dead! Where’s Cullen?”

Boyd stiffened, pressed back into Raylan like he could melt into Raylan’s chest and disappear.

“Dead,” Raylan rasped, the word lined with the dust trapped in his throat. He wouldn’t let Boyd apologize for that. _Raylan_ wouldn’t apologize for that, because he wasn’t sorry. Briggs had died saving Boyd.

It would have been different, if he’d died for Raylan. Raylan couldn’t have justified that, an alpha foreman with two girls and a mate throwing his life away for a boy whose grave was already plotted and dug. But Raylan would have sacrificed the whole county for Boyd and refused to call it anything but a fair trade.

Alf’s face fell, but he nodded, closed the elevator door and cut them off from the wrenching, crunching sounds of the mountain claiming her due.

“We counted off everyone but you and Briggs,” he said, though he sounded suddenly far away, his voice ringing strangely in Raylan’s ears, a tinny echo bouncing through his head. “Ronnie got his leg torn up, but the ambulances are on their way. No word yet from the other crews,” he continued, expression grave. “And – Givens? You okay?”

The elevator walls were melting, and Napier’s head was bobbing back and forth, swinging into two heads and back to one, Raylan’s limbs trembling with something that didn’t feel like relief. “I don’t feel so good,” he told Boyd, slumped against Boyd’s back, his chin on Boyd’s shoulder and his hand in Boyd’s.

It was Boyd who caught him, when the shimmering, shaking world tumbled away.

 

Raylan came to as Boyd dragged him out of the elevator, felt the hardhat tugged off his head and dropped to the ground.

“He’s fine,” he heard Boyd say into his hair, dragging them away from Napier. “If you could just check in for us at the front desk, so they know we ain’t dead? I’m gonna take him straight home.” Then the hands holding Raylan upright shook him, and the voice brushing through his hair grew fierce. “Raylan Givens, you had best stand up and walk. C’mon, Raylan. If you don’t, I’ll be forced to carry you like a girl.”

“Dizzy,” Raylan complained, and buried his nose in Boyd’s grimy neck. “Mmm, you smell good.”

“You are going to regret this powerfully, once you’ve come to your senses,” Boyd muttered, and the world shifted as he put one arm around Raylan’s knees and lifted him off his feet. “God _damn_ , you’re heavy.”

“You’re very strong,” Raylan said, keeping his eyes shut so the spinning world didn’t make him vomit. Boyd’s skin was cool, and Raylan happily pressed his overheated forehead to Boyd’s cheek. “That’s nice.”

“Fucking suppressants,” Boyd groaned, jostling Raylan in an attempt to keep him from slipping to the ground as they crossed the parking lot. “You’d think the motherfucking pharmaceutical industry could brew something that would survive a cave-in, but _no_. Raylan, you hearing me?”

“Mmm-hmm,” Raylan agreed, Boyd’s words swimming in the haze blanketing Raylan’s head. “I hear you. We going somewhere, Boyd?” he wondered, lifting his head when Boyd set him down to open the truck door. “Going to Helen’s?”

“No,” Boyd said gruffly, depositing Raylan into the driver’s seat, then shoving him over and climbing in. “We are not. We need someplace where nobody’s around to stick their nose where it don’t belong, because, boy, you smell like a block of pastry shops.”

“I do not,” Raylan disagreed. He lifted his wrist to sniff it, and then grew distracted by the cool air blowing from the vents over his fingers. That air smelled delicious, smelled like summer and dawn and not coal and methane and death. Boyd didn’t smell as good, though; he had the snow melt scent of grief, overlaid with ammonia worry and the metallic taste of pain. Raylan sniffed again, and caught the faintest hint of arousal beneath it, gunpowder and lightning and the wind that was vanguard to the storm. “Boyd, why do you smell worried?”

Boyd sighed, and tucked his nose into Raylan’s hair. “If you were in your right mind, darling, _you’d_ be worried that you could scent me. But judging from your fever and your overpowering scent and the fact that you allowed me to _carry_ you to the truck, I would say that you’re in heat.”

“That’s impossible,” Raylan told him, though it did explain the vertigo, and the feverish flush he could feel radiating from his face and chest.

It might explain his desire to fold into Boyd’s chest, to sink into Boyd’s skin and leave fingertip bruises on Boyd’s heart the way he sucked them onto Boyd’s neck and pressed them into his hips. It would have been better to blame that on the heat — only Raylan had felt that way for months, had tangled himself into Boyd at a cemetery years before and refused to let go.

Boyd blew through a stop sign, and horns blared. They passed an ambulance and a firetruck headed the opposite direction. Headed for the mine. It could be days, before rescue got the all clear to search for survivors, especially since the Myrtle Creek mine was almost tapped out. It might not be worth the excavation — B&D might shut it down, if there was no one to rescue, pay the widows and leave the bodies in the mine. (When it came to Harlan’s bloody history, the mining companies had dumped more bodies down mineshafts than the Crowders and the Givenses combined.)

“If I were to hazard a guess,” Boyd said, once the wailing of sirens had faded away, “it might be that your heat’s been behind several of this week’s oddities. Not that I am complaining, mind you, but you are not usually so amorous during the work week.” Raylan hummed. That was true. On the other hand, they spent most of their work week sleeping, normally, and that schedule had been disrupted by their daddies running them out of their homes. “I imagine that the suppressants, well, suppressed it, up until the cave-in flushed them out of your system, same as the last time.”

The last time it had been the black, that did it, everything lost in the pitch-dark maw of the mine, the terror of being buried alive in his own grave. This time was different. This time the sky had fallen in, and Boyd had been all Raylan could see.

“I don’t like this,” Raylan mumbled, fumbling at the zipper on his coveralls, the clothes itchy and too hot, wanting to find a zipper that peeled him out of his skin. “Boyd, I can’t think.” His head was floating somewhere above his body, his fingers swollen and sensitive to everything, summer air and the rising sun and soft, dark hairs on Boyd’s forearm, the fragile skin of his wrist.

“Shh, baby,” Boyd murmured, and Raylan frowned, didn’t like that and couldn’t think of why. “We’re almost there. I’ll take care of you, Raylan.”

“Okay,” Raylan acquiesced, dipping his head to press his ear to Boyd’s chest, listening to the racing, uneven rhythm of his heart.

Boyd’s heart was still trapped in the mines, he thought, caged in by coal dust and standing in Cullen Briggs’s grave. Maybe they had never gotten out. Raylan closed his eyes, felt the darkness rush in, the scent of coal dust in his mouth and terror rising in his chest.

“I’ll take care of you,” Boyd said again, tucked Raylan against his body to keep him safe from the mine collapsing around them, brushing his fingers through Raylan’s hair like he did some nights in the field, once he thought Raylan was asleep. “I’m right here.”

“I know.”

Boyd would never be anywhere else, not even when the world caved in. Arlo left Raylan battered in the middle of a road. Frances left him with his daddy when she ran. Helen wanted Raylan to do the leaving. But Boyd never left, not even when Raylan pushed him away. _I’ll take care of you_ , Boyd had said, and Raylan’s head was fuzzy, but he shrugged and thought, _why not let him try?_

 

Things faded from comprehension, after that, a wash of sounds and scents and his own keening, begging _harder faster more_ , begging for Boyd’s knot. “I hate this,” he might have sobbed, slamming his ass down too quickly on Boyd’s dick and drawing winces from them both, the first swell of his knot catching on Raylan’s rim, the promise of some measure of relief, the first time or the third or the tenth. “You did this to me. You wanted this.”

The relief didn’t last, not even to the end of Boyd’s knot. Boyd fucked Raylan face to face, laid on his back and let Raylan ride him, flipped him over and took him on all fours, and it wasn’t enough. Raylan needed more. He tried to scratch it out of Boyd’s skin; his hole was still stretched around Boyd’s knot and it _wasn’t enough_ , fuck, he needed more, he needed –

Raylan tasted coal dust and metal, the salt of Boyd’s sweat and the gunpowder scent of his skin. Boyd slid his wrist into Raylan’s gaping mouth, muffling his cries as he rocked deeper inside of him. Raylan howled, desperate for something he couldn’t get.

“Shh, Raylan,” Boyd murmured, pressed his wrist against Raylan’s teeth. “You have me, baby.” He spoke the words knife-sharp into the back of Raylan’s neck, branded them onto the knob of his spine, sliced them deep so that Raylan would feel them for days. “You have me, I’m right here, I’m all yours.”

Raylan bit down. He cut his omega teeth into Boyd’s skin, staked his claim through muscle, blood, and sinew, etched it onto each fragile bone in Boyd’s wrist. Everything slid away, then: the desperation, the ache; everything except for Boyd’s blood pooling in Raylan’s mouth and the feeling of him — dynamite and icy river water, a mountain shiver in his voice that ran wild through Raylan’s veins.

Boyd was _alive_. He was alive, and he was here, and Raylan could feel the drag of his cock against the sore edges of Raylan’s hole, could taste his blood and catch the sweat Boyd shook from his dark hair into Raylan’s stinging eyes. Boyd could have died, in the mines, died and left Raylan with nothing. But he was still here. He was with Raylan, and what did the rest of the world matter, as long as Raylan had that?

“Oh, Raylan,” Boyd breathed, Raylan’s name singing through the wind around them, curling like a promise through the marrow of Raylan’s bones. “ _Raylan_. How am I ever going to let you go?”

Everything faded away until it was just Raylan and Boyd gasping for air in the bed of Boyd’s truck, Raylan’s face pressed into the blanket and Boyd’s pressed to the back of his neck, wound around every inch of Raylan that he could reach.

Raylan drifted off like that, Boyd’s cock pulsing inside him, Boyd’s wrist throbbing in his mouth, covered in coal dust and semen and sweat. Safe.

 

When he woke up it was dark and he was alone, sprawled naked across the bed of Boyd’s truck and shivering in the evening breeze. He stretched — Boyd couldn’t have gone far, not when Raylan could practically feel Boyd’s gaze on his bare skin — and twisted, clear-headed for the first time in hours, the past day nothing but flashes of memory and sensation, an unpleasant twinge in his ass that would hopefully fade, and the tang of copper on his teeth.

He sat up, looking around for his clothes, maybe some water, and found Boyd. Boyd, fully dressed and sitting on the tailgate, surrounded by the boxes of cashed paychecks they’d buried in the field every few months. Boyd with his fingers twisted together, an old rag tied around his wrist, and his head lowered as if in prayer, staring at his hands so that Raylan couldn’t see his eyes.

“What’s going on?” Raylan mumbled, still groggy from the heat. He turned onto his back and wished for his clothes; felt suddenly naked in a way he hadn’t felt with Boyd since the first time, felt skinny and bony-kneed, his cock soft and his ass sticky with slick and Boyd’s come. Raylan tugged the blanket over his hips and wished he had something besides dirty coveralls to wear.

Boyd threw him a clean pair of boxers and some jeans, because Boyd could read Raylan’s mind even when he was busy gazing at his own feet. The jeans were Boyd’s and a little short, but they would do until Raylan could change. Raylan tugged them on quickly, wincing with every shift of his hips, and rolled onto his knees, coming to rest directly between Boyd’s legs.

“Boyd? You gonna answer me?”

“You were right,” Boyd croaked. He sounded twelve years old again, hair slicked down and voice cracking as men lowered his mama into the ground. “There ain’t nothing for you, in Harlan. You need to go.”

Raylan had been waiting _years_ for Boyd to say that, to agree that there was no future for them in Harlan County, that there was nothing but violence and an early death. But if he’d been waiting so long to hear it, why did the pronouncement make his jaw clench, why did it sting like frozen metal digging into the base of his neck?

“That’s bullshit,” he hissed, dug his fingers into the tops of Boyd’s thighs and hung on.

He must have surprised Boyd, with that response. The other boy lifted his head and widened his bloodshot eyes at Raylan.

“It’s bullshit,” Raylan said again, enunciating every syllable without letting Boyd break their gaze. “You want to get out of Harlan? Fantastic. We’ll go right this fucking second. But I ain’t tucking my tail between my legs and leaving you to die in the mines because you’re suddenly concerned for my health.” If anyone had a right to be concerned, it was Raylan. It was Raylan who’d nearly lost Boyd to the black.

Boyd replied with a wan smile; and maybe it was the lingering remnants of his heat, but Raylan could scent the anguish in it, could practically taste Boyd’s unhappiness on his tongue.

“I ain’t going back to the mines, Raylan. My daddy has accorded me –”

“And more bullshit.” Raylan slid forward, knocked his bare chest into Boyd’s clasped hands, brought their faces a hand’s breadth apart. “You ain’t gonna agree to anything he offers. You think I’m dumb?”

“Well, now, I wouldn’t phrase it quite so harshly,” Boyd answered, his brittle gaze softening, and the tension in Raylan’s shoulders melted away at the warmth that put under his skin. “You’re awful pretty, baby. That ought to suffice.”

“I ain’t your baby, asshole.” Raylan would have grinned — they’d had this fight before, would no doubt have it again every time Boyd forgot himself and began whispering sweet nothings in Raylan’s ears, could have it every day for the rest of their lives and Raylan wouldn’t mind — but he could feel Boyd’s misery weighing down his bones, felt his own mood sour in response.

“Come on, Boyd,” he demanded shrilly, sore and nauseous from the heat and resolutely not thinking about Briggs’s headlamp painting Boyd in cinders and gold before it was lost to the dark. He was too tired for this.

“You ain’t _ever_ gonna work for your daddy, and you know it. I know it.” He hadn’t known it a few months ago, but after Bo had beaten his son for leaving Raylan’s truck in their yard, Boyd hadn’t been able to hide his disgust at his daddy’s intimidating ways. “There ain’t nothing keeping you here, anymore. We can leave money for Bowman, if you want. We can _leave_.”

Boyd closed his eyes, at that, dipped his head and kissed Raylan, curled one hand around the back of Raylan’s neck and squeezed too tightly.

“Raylan,” he whispered, and Raylan’s name was a hammer through a bedroom window, a Motörhead cassette and revolver engraved with his name. It was callused fingers brushing through his hair late at night, a smile first thing in the morning; a hand wrapped in his, pulling him out of his own grave. There were a lot of things Raylan didn’t want in his life, but it turned out he could live with them all, as long as it didn’t mean living with Boyd dead.

“Come on,” Raylan said, didn’t want to linger and argue over whatever Boyd thought he needed to say. “We can shower at Helen’s. She can’t smell a damn thing. Then we can go.”

“All right, Raylan,” Boyd agreed. “Whatever you want.” But his hands clutched Raylan too close as they stood, and his eyes were dark.

* * *

Raylan’s heat had tapered off in the late afternoon, either because the adrenaline finally wore off or maybe the suppressants kicked back in. Or maybe it was because Raylan had used his dull omega teeth to carve divots in Boyd’s skin. Boyd couldn’t be sure. They hadn’t really discussed omega heats in Health class — and certainly not _male_ omega heats triggered by suppressant-overwhelming cave-ins — other than Coach Morgan defining them as “God’s gift.”

The God of Ishmael, perhaps, cast out of his home by his father’s jealous mate. Or Esau, cheated out of his birthright by his twin brother and God’s favored son.

The heat took everything from Raylan, stripped him down to nothing but fevered skin and a dripping hole desperate for a knot. It _hurt_ him, made the sun too bright and the blankets too rough and his skin too tight. It made him miserable. It made him nothing but an omega; it made him less than the man that he was.

And it was Boyd’s fault.

It had to be. Boyd may not have done his Biology homework, but Raylan had gone five years on suppressants without a glitch. Then he started sleeping with Boyd, and those same sups failed in less than eight months. It couldn’t be anything but Boyd or the mines, and while Boyd didn’t doubt that the cave-in had thrown the sups for a loop, Raylan had been taking them all week and still acting strange.

“I hate this,” Raylan had cried, shoving himself back onto Boyd’s dick with none of his usual teasing or finesse. “I _hate_ this.” And Boyd had known it was true, Raylan’s pride ripped away from him, his dignity destroyed. “I hate you,” he’d sobbed, when Boyd had flipped them and taken over, trying to give Raylan’s body what it needed, pounding into Raylan until Raylan’s head banged into the side of the truck. “This is your fault, dammit. Nobody else makes me feel this way.”

Nineteen years of Arlo trying and failing, and it was _Boyd_ who’d finally destroyed Raylan.

Then he’d started begging, would have bloodied his head on the rusty metal of the truck if Boyd hadn’t slid his hand in between them before Raylan could crack his skull.

Boyd had waited until Raylan fell asleep — waited until he could smell the heat dissipating, could lap guiltily at the blood he’d drawn when he’d nipped the base of Raylan’s neck and taste nothing but sated exhaustion and the taint of coal — then climbed out of the truck. He pulled some clothes out of his duffel, and went to dig up the money they’d buried in the trees.

Harlan would kill Raylan, if he stayed. Either the mines would finish them both off, or Arlo would do something worse than throw his son out of a moving truck, or Bo would finally realize that the best way to ensure his son’s obedience was to threaten “that Givens get.” And if Harlan didn’t kill him then Boyd would, would drive Raylan into a heat and humiliate him with his biology, whether they were in Harlan or New York City or a hot air balloon over the Taj Mahal.

Boyd’s wrist throbbed as he shoveled dirt out of the ground same as he’d shoveled coal down the shaft. He settled into a rhythm and allowed himself a moment to imagine what Jimmie Louise had sneeringly suggested years before. Pretended that he was a bitch who could be claimed and bred, _Raylan’s_ bitch. That they lived in a world where no biological imperatives could alter Raylan from his belligerent self, that he could sink his teeth into Boyd’s neck and command Boyd to go with him when he left. That they could build a life somewhere beyond the hills, in a world where Raylan didn’t flinch at the idea of being labeled a faggot and Boyd didn’t balk at the loss of history, the people and the trees and the stones that would remember his name.

Then he wiped the sweat off his brow and the dream with it, hauled up the metal boxes of cash and trudged slowly back to the truck, squinting as the last fading rays of the sun crashed into the hills.

Harlan had no shrift for dreamers, after all, and nothing but bloody endings for their dreams.

He should have known that Raylan wouldn’t see what Boyd was trying to do. Raylan was too smart by half — smarter than Boyd, when it came to some things, because he hadn’t realized that he wouldn’t shake his daddy’s hand if it were extended, not until Raylan’s saying it made it so. Smart enough to know that there was nothing Boyd wanted more than to follow Raylan into the sunset, to rest his hand on Raylan’s knee and complain about the screaming ruckus of Raylan’s music on the radio.

 _I love you_ , Boyd nearly said, looked at Raylan’s earnest whiskey eyes and couldn’t hold it in. _Christ, I love you._

But Raylan was smart enough to stop Boyd’s words with a command and a kiss, to shuffle them into the truck cab before Boyd could give his game away. Boyd agreed, because they did need to go to Helen’s: Raylan needed his clothes, and Boyd would need to borrow her phone to beg Cousin Johnny for a ride and a place to sleep.

Of course, Raylan thought Boyd had agreed to the leaving.

He wanted to. He _did_. But Boyd had already killed one man, that day. Briggs had given him the chance to save Raylan from Harlan — to save Raylan from Boyd.

 

Any passing car with its headlights on could make out their silhouettes, but that didn’t keep Raylan to his side of the truck. He sprawled into Boyd’s space, folded his leg onto the seat so he could pin Boyd’s thigh with his knee, slung his arm over Boyd’s shoulders the way Boyd had always dragged him close in the school halls.

Raylan had curled into himself all those years, tucked down yet still ready to sprint for the horizon and take flight. Boyd had prodded Raylan open with joking tackles and noogies and that arm around his shoulders — he had figured that if Raylan fled, at least he’d have to drag Boyd along for the ride.

“We’ll have Aunt Helen’s money, too,” Raylan said, once they’d bounced down the dirt roads and back into town, wincing whenever they went over a bump. “However much that is.”

Boyd pinched his lips together, watched Raylan rub his free hand over his neck, fingertips brushing the spot Boyd’s teeth had grazed his skin and pausing there for a second or two.

It wasn’t a bite. Not really. Raylan had torn into Boyd’s chest with his stubby fingernails, scratched furrows down Boyd’s arms and begged for something more than Boyd’s knot and Boyd’s blood under his nails. Boyd had offered what he could, sacrificed his wrist to keep Raylan from biting through his own tongue, and buried his face against the knobs of Raylan’s spine, alpha canines catching on the base of Raylan’s neck, the hint of Raylan’s blood enough to prevent Boyd from sinking his teeth into his omega’s throat and marking his claim.

Even blinded by his heat, Raylan never would have forgiven him for that.

“You shower first,” Boyd insisted as they pulled into Helen’s drive, the porch light on and Helen already standing outside, her arms folded and a cigarette hanging from her lip. She’d probably heard Boyd’s truck coming from a mile away, just like the rest of the county. “You smell worse.”

Raylan snorted, and Boyd could taste the sharp, apple-crisp edges of his amusement in the air. “You sure know how to romance a boy,” he retorted, caught Boyd’s eyes but didn’t lean in for a kiss, mindful of his aunt’s keen gaze. “I won’t take long,” he promised, and slid out of the truck.

Boyd followed, and they were both stopped on the lawn by Helen’s scorching glare. “Where the hell have you pups been?” she cried, voice breaking. “Frannie gets a call this morning, man says the mine’s caved in and he wanted to check that Raylan had made it home all right. You got any idea how worried we been?”

She slapped Raylan’s bare chest, then scowled at Boyd like she’d slap him, too, if he came close enough.

“You boys get inside this instant. I got half a mind to tan your sorry hides.”

“How about you let us shower, first?” Raylan replied, seemingly unconcerned by his aunt’s rage. “You can call Mama and tell her we’ll be over shortly, to say good-bye.”

“Good-bye?” Helen echoed, scanning their dirty faces, the coal on Raylan’s streaked with tears from begging through his heat, their lips swollen and Boyd’s arms bloodied with scratches, hickies darkening above his shirt collar, all down his neck. Helen might have been a beta, but she wasn’t dumb. “You boys planning some kind of vacation?”

“We’re leaving town,” Raylan corrected, striding inside with only a faint hitch to his step. He raised an eyebrow at his aunt. “Assuming your offer still stands?” he added, cocking his head and waiting for her to reply.

Helen took a long drag from her cigarette, then waved the stub at Boyd. “I didn’t offer him nothing,” she declared. Raylan raised his other eyebrow, and she wrinkled her nose, blowing smoke out of her nostrils like a dragon guarding its hoard. “Fine,” she conceded. “I’ll go dig up that money while you put some clothes on, boy.”

“She keeps it in the wall,” Raylan mumbled as Helen walked away, squinting at Boyd and glancing over at her shotgun propped against the wall. “Don’t know why she’s going out to the garden shed.”

Boyd knew why. He was a Crowder, and everyone knew a Crowder couldn’t be trusted: not left alone with a woman’s shotgun or her nephew or the location of her hidden cash. Everyone knew Crowders never did for anyone but themselves.

“You look like a raccoon, baby,” Boyd said, couldn’t help the endearment, couldn’t help his smile at the way it made Raylan’s face scrunch up like he’d sipped curdled milk. “Go scrub up.”

“You smell like an outhouse,” Raylan shot back, grinning at Boyd as he walked backwards down the hall, moving slow like there was no reason on earth they should hurry this along.

As though they had all the time in the world to call each other names and smile wide, eyes sparkling in the prelude to a kiss.

It must have been the heat, malingering, leaching out all Raylan’s common sense, overriding his promise that he wouldn’t bow to anyone, that he wouldn’t go out in the world and have it contemn him as nothing but Boyd’s mate.

Boyd stepped into the half-bath and wrecked one of Helen’s hand towels when he used it to scrub as much of the day as he could from his face. It left the towel stained with coal and blood, semen and sweat and slick, and it left Boyd with coal dust smeared over his cheek, smelling like crushed violet soap and potpourri.

He threw the towel in the trash and used his nose to find the guest room where Raylan had been sleeping, found Raylan’s old gym bag in the closet and started upending drawers onto the bed.

He stuffed a handful of underwear into the bag, reached deep into the drawer and found cold metal. Drew out black steel and polished wood, the revolver he’d bought off his daddy and engraved for Raylan, _RG_ on the grip in finely styled print. He held onto it for a moment — thinking of Cowboys and Indians, dove hunting and shooting ‘Welcome’ signs on the highway at night, cookies cooling on the rack and two young outlaws planning their first raid — then folded it carefully into one of Raylan’s t-shirts, tucked it inside Raylan’s bag.

It was good that Raylan had a gun. (He might need one, in whatever big city he chose as his home. He might draw it on some asshole, someday, brush his thumb over the engraving and remember the boy who’d put it there.)

He found the prescription bottles balled up inside Raylan’s graying socks, read the label and dumped twice the recommended dose into his hand. He’d always assumed Raylan couldn’t get pregnant — omega females struggled to get pregnant in Harlan County, struggled to carry pregnancies to term in a place where folks survived on whiskey and cigarettes, where they breathed coal — but a handful of sups would prevent any question of that happening, prevent Boyd from once again turning Raylan into something that he didn’t want to be.

No one was driving down the road when he went outside to toss Raylan’s bag into the truck, pulled his own duffel out of the cab and thrown it carelessly into Helen’s yard. Lights were still on in the windows, though; folks home from work, finishing their dinners and pouring a glass of bourbon to nurse through the ten o’clock news. Boyd wondered if they’d talk about Cullen Briggs tonight, or if the Myrtle Creek mine collapse had already been forgotten, mourned for five minutes on the morning news and filed away. He wondered if he could kill Roscoe Holland for cursing their shift, or if the mine had already taken him as its due.

Raylan was out of the shower when Boyd came back into the room carrying a glass of water. His hair was dripping down his neck, water droplets slipping down the planes of his back, disappearing into the towel wrapped low on his hips.

“You’re laying out my clothes, now?” he asked, gesturing at the clothes Boyd had left on the bed. “Are you planning a career as a butler?”

“I would look good in a suit,” Boyd told him. He meant to smile, but the words tasted like ashes in his mouth, and Raylan shot him a piercing glance that made Boyd look away. “I brought you water, for the pills.”

Raylan took the glass, still eyeing Boyd warily, downed the handful of sups in one swallow and drained the glass. Then he pulled off his towel and threw it at Boyd’s head. Boyd licked his lips, staring openly, trying to take in every inch of skin, every scar and mole so that he wouldn’t forget.

“Tell me what’s going through your head,” Raylan demanded, struggling into his shirt, cotton catching on the damp spots on his arms, the fresh blood welling at the base of his neck. “You’re acting mighty strange, and you’re in an awful hurry, all of a sudden, for a man who swore he’d never leave. We could get some sleep, leave tomorrow. Or wait a week, and maybe get Kenny Roy to fix the damn muffler on your truck.”

Boyd couldn’t wait a week. He couldn’t wait until tomorrow. He’d have lost the strength to do what was best for Raylan, by then. He’d follow Raylan without any argument, or hold onto his ankles and beg him to stay.

“You need to go tonight,” he said firmly, and Raylan’s hand stilled over the buckle on his belt.

“You’re talking like you ain’t coming with me,” Raylan said. He lifted his head, his brown eyes dark, the churning brown of a river in a flood. “Boyd.” He stepped forward, caught Boyd’s cold hands in his, Raylan’s skin still pink from the shower and radiating warmth. “I ain’t leaving without you.”

“Yes, you are,” Boyd said, and the words tasted like bile in his mouth.

“Is this about being mates?” Raylan asked, gaze darting over Boyd’s face, biting his lip and frowning at whatever he’d read in Boyd’s eyes.

“If it is –” The struggle was scrawled across Raylan’s narrow face, shoulders already lifted to hide his neck. “If you want,” he whispered, squeezing Boyd’s fingers tight enough to crack bone, forcing the words reluctantly out of his mouth. “If that’s what it takes for you to come with me, then you can –”

“Don’t!” Boyd’s voice cracked like a whip through the quiet room, stopped Raylan’s words in their tracks. Boyd couldn’t let Raylan give him that, couldn’t let him put everything Boyd had desperately wished for into his hands. Not when Boyd knew it wasn’t really Raylan offering, but an omega reeling with the aftereffects of their heat. _Raylan_ would never allow himself to be claimed. “Don’t do that, Raylan. Don’t offer me something you ain’t willing to give.”

“Who says I –”

Christ, but Raylan was stubborn, his jaw set and a lit fuse burning down in his fiery eyes. _He loves me_ , Boyd thought, and couldn’t swallow for the lump in his throat.

“I ain’t going with you,” he said, choking on every word, forcing himself through to the final act. “And I don’t want you to stay.”

Raylan jerked his hands away from Boyd’s, twisted around so that Boyd couldn’t see how hard his blow had struck. He could only catch the tremble in Raylan’s fingers and the tendons straining in Raylan’s unmarked neck.

“Is that so?” Raylan replied, his voice a harsh exhale. He pulled on his socks without sitting down, shoved his feet into his boots. Then he shoved his face into Boyd’s, because Raylan Givens never backed down from a fight. “Well, then, it’s too bad that you ain’t got a say in what I do or do not do with my life.”

Boyd wanted to kiss him. This was Raylan Givens free from the dictates of his biology, the heat that had made him writhe, made him beg to submit. This was the boy who’d given a speech on Ulysses S. Grant, who’d taken on sixth graders on the playground in third grade, who’d taken a bat to Dickie Bennett’s knee.

Instead, Boyd wrapped a hand around Raylan’s wrist and squeezed.

Raylan’s eyes widened, disbelief and betrayal dawning over his face before Boyd could say a word.

“You’ll leave tonight.” Boyd felt the command vibrate through his bones, throb through his bitten wrist and fall from his mouth like hunks of coal.

 _Don’t do it again_ , Raylan had insisted, despite the fact that Boyd had never commanded Raylan with any intent. He hadn’t made any promises; but Raylan had trusted him — and everyone knew not to trust a Crowder, in the end.

“You’ll get the hell out of Harlan County,” he commanded, and Raylan shuddered with rage, shook in Boyd’s unyielding grip, but couldn’t pull away. “And you’ll stay gone.”

 _You’ll be happy_ , he wanted to add, but he didn’t. He loosened his grip and allowed Raylan to rip his wrist away, the heat from Raylan’s skin already fading from Boyd’s hand. He curled his hand into a fist, trying to preserve the last of Raylan’s warmth, trying to sear the feeling into his memory before it was gone.

“I’m just trying to do what’s best for you,” he said quietly, but that only seemed to set Raylan’s anger boiling over and scorching the air.

“Fuck you,” Raylan spat, folding his arms and planting his feet. Raylan was ornery as a mule, more determined to stay put with each crack of the whip; but Boyd could see the command resting on the bunched muscles of Raylan’s shoulders and in the muscle twitching under his eye. Raylan’s eyes were bright, and his lashes were damp, the command hanging between them, pushing Raylan inexorably toward the door.

“Fuck you, Boyd,” he whispered, his voice cracking on the words.

Boyd took it as resignation and stepped forward, hoping for a minute to say goodbye.

Raylan didn’t give him the chance.

He shoved past Boyd, too quick for Boyd to catch more than a muffled sob. Raylan strode through the door and out of the room, didn’t stop when he met his Aunt Helen in the hall. Their voices mingled, for a moment, echoed through the house, and then there was the slam of a metal door and the discordant rumble of Boyd’s truck.

Boyd flinched and sunk onto the bed, gave himself one long, shuddering breath before forcing himself back onto his feet.

Helen was on the phone, no doubt updating Mrs. Givens on her son’s abrupt departure, or warning her that Raylan would be by to say his farewells and that she should meet him in the yard so her husband couldn’t get too near. After a few minutes, she came out into her driveway, lit a fresh cigarette and stood beside Boyd over a fresh oil stain, standing in her slippers and bathrobe, peering down the dark street.

“What are you standing here for?” she asked, scowling at Boyd, probably checking to see if he’d made off with any of the trinkets on her shelves. “You waiting for that boy to turn around? You think he’s gonna come back for you?”

Boyd shook his head. He wrapped his hand around his other wrist, tightening his grip until he could feel every mark Raylan had scored into his skin. “No, ma’am,” he said, staring hard into the night, wondering which faint light might be Raylan’s taillights, the boy’s eyes on the horizon and the truck kicking up dust in his wake. “Raylan ain’t ever coming back to Harlan, Miss Helen. I’ve made certain of that.”

He’d commanded it, though he knew it was wasn’t the meat of the command that mattered, but the fact of it. Raylan hadn’t trusted anyone, before Boyd, had been curled in and waiting for the day he could escape. And Boyd had betrayed that trust. (He had told Raylan that he didn’t want him to stay.)

“Huh,” Helen said skeptically, then handed Boyd her cigarette. “You give yourself a lot of credit, Boyd Crowder. Make sure you get that bag inside before the dew falls, or it’ll mold. Guest bed’s empty, if you’re in need of a place to sleep.”

The guest bed was empty because Boyd had sent Raylan away. Had sent him hurtling toward neon lights and skies without stars, his gaze fixed on a better future where Harlan would never see him again.

“Thanks,” Boyd rasped, his throat tight. He felt her walk away, though he didn’t turn to watch her go. He stood in the driveway for a long time, invisible but for the lit ember of his cigarette, staring into the night for a glimpse of taillights that were long gone.

For the first time, Boyd Crowder existed in a place where there was no Raylan Givens. Existed in a world where Raylan Givens would never be again.

The cigarette burned out. A car full of teenagers drove by, two boys and their dates, loud music and smoke and laughter that rocked the car. They turned right at the corner, and their taillights faded from view. Boyd took a breath. Took another, deeper one, straining his lungs and his injured wrist and his burning eyes. Then he bent down, picked up his bag, and went inside.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so sorry. Don't kill me. Also, thank you again for all of your wonderful, detailed, thoughtful, brilliant comments! It's going to be at least several months before the bridge is up, probably, but feel free to come harass me on tumblr (toli-a).


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